I don’t know how to take Christmas down in a non-maniacal way.
On January 2nd, I wake up with an EVERYTHING-MUST-GO mentality, a fire sale on holiday cheer.
Just one calendar day ago, these decorations looked merry and right, but now they are imposters, garish reminders that a cozy stretch of irretrievable time has ended. More, something that should’ve been obvious about the tree all along becomes clear: it’s been standing there dead since we put it up in early December. Like so many of us, it’s just been trying to hang on through the holidays.
I start taking ornaments off the tree in handfuls. Dry needles cling to many, and while I understand the desperation, I shake them off and pack the decorations into bins like someone’s timing me. I untwirl the garland from the banister, stack the 22 years of framed Santa pictures, pile the stockings next to the Christmas pyramids. I take the battery-filled candles out of all the windows, undoing the welcome they were supposed to signal. I stand the nutcrackers together on the dining room table, and they loiter as if they’re weary executives leaving a shell-cracking convention, waiting for a shuttle to the airport.
The older kids haven’t woken up yet, but I text them with a whole batch of exciting to-dos they can get to-done once they do: cut down the garlands on the gate outside. Bring the packed bins to the basement. Try new stuff on. Please some thank you notes. Submit returns to my processing department.
I invite the kids to be liberal with holiday returns. Don’t keep it unless you LOVE it/will wear it EVERYDAY. I want them to defend anything they want to keep like it’s their thesis. Because even though I personally picked many of these gifts, and do agree that giving is the greatest part of Christmas, gifts become stuff. And on January 2, I always want less stuff.
Invariably, Northern California plays along with this return to spareness, serving an early January day that is bright and crisp, and post-rain clean. As if the whole town sits neatly folded in a laundry basket. Or as if the world itself went to the Container Store and got bins for the trees and the sky and stacked everything just so, stepped back satisfied and declared yes, this looks good; now we can move forward.
When my kids were younger, I’ll admit that this emptiness of January used to kinda fill me.
Because the holidays can be be oh-so-happy and merry with young children, and then remarkably unsustainable. There’s some sort of cap on cups of hot chocolate and late movies and chaotic family gatherings. A school break can just about break you. So when my kids were little, and those long holiday vacations would end, I would comfort myself by thinking that the holidays had to, as all good things must, end.
And there was something affirming about returning to order and structure. Dropping everyone off at school that first morning back after vacation felt deeply correct, feeding my abiding love of everything in its place. Back to classes and early wake ups and homework: it sounded boring and dry and dutiful and just exactly like what everyone needed to be doing after the glut of the holidays.
But now at the end of the holidays, I’ve reverted to that crushing childhood feeling of December 26th, all the anticipation spent, knowing what you got and what you didn’t, thinking of being as far as you can possibly be from the next glorious December 25th.
I don’t want a return to order and structure. I want more limbo! I want more cups of hot chocolate and more movie nights. Above all else, I don’t want everything to be back in its place because for two of my most important everythings, those places are now 3,000 miles away.
So as I pack Christmas away, I don’t step back satisfied seeing the way forward. I don’t even think the room looks clean. I think it looks empty.
Without the Christmas tree sitting in the living room window, the mid-winter sticks of wisteria sit like naked bones on a trellis just outside the window. Knowing what these vines are capable of at other times of the year — bunches of purple flowers, bountiful to the point of embarrassment, with thickets of leaves — I feel like in this moment, the wisteria is trying to be bleak. As if, here in January, even the flora’s gone emo.
Since Little House on the Prairie is my Roman Empire, I comfort myself by thinking of how dreadful the end of the holidays had to have been in those days. When kids got a rag doll or mittens or a bolt of fabric that Ma would turn into a dress or a single orange in their stockings. And then down came the tree and on came a full-bodied winter and whatever ways the season would choose to ravage a family. A flat, cold life on flat, cold land until an impossibly distant spring.
Now things feel kinda empty, yes, but hey, I reason, we have heat! And food. And also it’s 55 degrees outside. I clean everything up and the house is warm and the appliances are all business as if they’ve made resolutions to work extra hard this year.
While I’m trying to convince myself I have it way better than young Laura Ingalls, a friend sends me a reel on instagram — advice for empty nesters dealing with post holiday departures. Remember the post holiday hype can feel lonely says the text while a pretty blonde woman who probably presents like .001% of the empty nesters out there dances around in her bare, very clean living room. Here’s what to do about it the next line promises, and I get excited because I love solutions, particularly easy ones. Get outside and move. That’s it. That’s the advice. And though I won’t argue that this can help, it’s less than I hoped for. My nest isn’t even empty and I run regularly and running is mostly helpful in that I can’t cry while running. But you can’t run all day. I’ve tried.
At some point you’re back in your bare, very clean living room.
I help my older son pack for his return to college. He needs to bring an unmanageable amount of stuff back to his already stuffed dorm room — skis and ski boots and winter boots and baseball stuff and layers and layers for Vermont cold. The dorm room, which already had a storage locker vibe, will be beyond capacity.
We pack his clothes into a bag called a Black Hole and while not everything is fitting, this couldn’t feel more fitting. Maybe this giant bag is where everything goes to disappear. Maybe all this matter will be compressed down to an infinitely tiny point. Maybe he will arrive at his dorm, unzip this behemoth and find only the smallest singularity inside.
Or maybe, and this is what I worry, he will not unzip this bag at all. In May, he will just bring it to the airport and get a new baggage claim tag. Or, yes, he will unzip it, but he will stage out of it for months, a duffel becoming his default dresser. I share this concern and he complains that I have too little faith in him. And then, in the next breath, he deadpans that my faith level is, considering track records, entirely reasonable.
My January reorg self wants to fly back with him. Just to make sure he eats on the plane. Just to help him carry the bags to his room. Just to unpack all of this. But I’m betting parenting experts would say this would impede his individuating.
Also he doesn’t need my help. He jokes, but he is now worthy of faith, a fact that feels both excellent and terrible. Didn’t I used to daydream about the day this kid would unpack his own bag, do laundry, make a sandwich? Didn’t I think I’d feel so much lighter and liberated when I didn’t have to do everything?
But didn’t I get something fundamental about all those efforts wrong: that all that work was heavy, but in the way of a weighted blanket, centering and comforting. And that each new kid independence, no matter how needed or right or appropriate, would drive an irreversible trend: an ever-increasing maternal work shortage, a constant furloughing.
Of course I wouldn’t miss the actual busy work or tasks themselves, but I would miss the part of motherhood marked by all that work.
That cozy stretch of irretrievable time.
All that fullness.
When all my everythings were in my same place.
I liked that part.
The night before my older son leaves, I remind my younger son that his brother will be leaving in the morning.
“Bro [this is what he calls him, as if we’re the Berenstain Bears, but slightly cooler] is leaving for the airport before you wake up tomorrow.”
“I don’t think so. I think his flight is cancelled.” This is always my youngest’s go-to for keeping people home. But his brother’s flight the day before had been canceled because of snow, so he was feeling extra powerful in his manifestations.
“I don’t think his flight tomorrow will be canceled so you need to give him a big hug tonight.”
“This is sad. I am sad. I will miss him.” My youngest has never had a single fifty minute session of therapy, but he names feelings as if a licensed professional has told him that doing so will defang them, that exposure will help.
“I know it is. But we’ll FaceTime him and we’ll visit him and soon enough, the summer will come, and he’ll be home again.” He’s unconvinced, probably because I’m not the lady for this particular pep talk. I’m saying good words, but I lack conviction.
“It’s sad,” he tells me again.
“I know,” I tell him again. And I kiss him goodnight and leave him to his processing because at the end of the day, any day, it’s rude to try to talk someone out of their feelings.
Downstairs my older son is laughing with his sisters as I fall sleep. The kids have all spent many nights with friends over this break, but now as the 11th hour dawns, they want to be together in the kitchen. I drift off to their rumbly noises below me, knowing that at least for this one more night, I’m on top of it all.
I come down in the morning to find sheets of their penmanship, cursive and printed versions of the alphabet, their signatures, the quick brown fox sentence. I know whose is whose: the economical print of my son’s, the many angles of my younger daughter’s, the fluidity of my oldest’s, who is possibly the last girl on earth to have learned bona fide cursive.
This penmanship competition is not their first. It’s an old childhood standard of theirs. I know how it goes, I’ve seen how they do it: sharing one pen, taking turns, watching each other, observing odd grips and curious letter formations.
If I’d saved them over all these years, I’d have a stuffed file of sheets just like this, but I didn’t because scratch paper like this always seemed like recycling to me.
Now I look at the sheet and it feels like a map, or like a retracing of steps, a proof of something shared. It’s small-scale graffiti making the same point the big-scale kind does: we were here.
We were kids, here, together.
And all of our sentences started here.
I tuck the sheet in the back of my new 2024 calendar, a souvenir of the times I’ve had over the holidays or motherhood or both.
My oldest and I go to San Francisco for the day after her siblings have all started back to school. People all over the country hearing about this city’s doom cycle might be concluding that the whole place is now just ugly — as if along with the foot traffic and store fronts, San Francisco has lost its natural good looks. But here we are, perched high above these undeniably good bones, with a panorama of the Headlands and the Golden Gate and downtown and the rolling hills dotted with happy colored homes. From this angle, even the Sales Force Tower looks to scale and only marginally post-apocalyptic.
We’re stunned, even though we’ve seen the view before. It’s stunning.
As we drive towards the Legion of Honor Museum, we pass through the rolling greens of Lincoln, a privately beautiful public golf course. I tell my daughter a version of her origin story that involves this course. I tell her that I played it once in September 2001 with my dad when he and my mom were visiting.
The round had felt longer than usual which is really saying something because golf is so impossibly long (does anyone know if anything can be done about this?). I felt less than fair on those fairways that day. Very queasy, and like more than anything, I just wanted to go back to our little house in Noe Valley and nap.
Two days later my parents were supposed to fly back to Boston and my brother called early in the morning from the east coast to say that there was some kind of air traffic trouble in New York and their flight would probably be delayed. Three days after that, with all flights grounded, my parents drove back to the east coast in a staggering push that involved one stop only at the Salt Lake City Tabernacle. Three days after they left, I took a pregnancy test and found out I was having her.
Then she was born and later she could walk and I dressed her in little red sneakers and tiny jeans and we picked our way through our foggy days in San Francisco together, she figuring out life and I figuring out motherhood; she sleeping whenever she saw fit and I sleeping approximately never. And despite this, and because of it too, we fell in love. And now, over 22 years later, we are alone together again in San Francisco and she is wearing red sneakers and jeans and when I ask her to describe what is going on in a Botticelli painting, she launches into the symbolism and the meaning of the facial expressions and the references to other works and quotes her professor from the art history class she took in Italy last summer.
And on this clearest of days, in this exquisite city, I think: it’s insane what can come of being a little queasy.
And, maybe,
And only maybe,
Good things must end to make way for other good things.
Jen.
....Little House on the Prairie is my Roman Empire.....thank you for that. Your writing brings me joy!
Beautiful Jen. Those memories stay forever in you heart. ❤️