My family loves celebrating holidays, especially my Mom, and have made an art over the years of gift giving, baking and lots of beloved holiday traditions. I wanted to pass this exuberance on to my own family, so the Holiday Season was always a big deal.
Every year when the kids were at home, Mike and I used to joke about creating The Best Christmas Ever (TM), making sure to go cut down the tree, decorate rafts of gingerbread cookies, leave carrots for the reindeer, read one holiday story every day, put on the special jammies, open one present on Christmas Eve and the whole nine yards. I love creating a spectacle and following traditions, but it’s a lot of time and responsibility, too. Calling forth the Best Christmas Ever every year was basically a part-time job for me alongside running my own business, home and childcare.
Now that the kids are college graduates, it’s a new ballgame and we’ve all been trying to figure out how to let a couple of the reindeer go out and enjoy the pasture and let a few elves focus on their pottery and competitive snowboarding. I don’t really know what elves do as side hustles. Anyway, this year, for me, really was the Best Christmas Ever.
My mom was actually the one who started the ball rolling, saying in early fall that our family was doing well, and considering the state of the world, it would be better to focus on giving to others instead of more material things for us. Since my gift buying and wrapping had snowballed to the point where, last year, I gave everyone their own baskets to keep all the gifts in, that was a welcome relief. I decided that I would give only handmade gifts and charity donations and told everyone well in advance.
Of course, every creative type has a certain longing for the Little House on the Prairie Christmas, where everyone gets a set of knitted mittens, hand-drawn paper dolls and an orange. But it’s gotten really hard to do when you have any possibility of giving more. I definitely suspect Ma and Pa would be up til all hours now assembling a new child-sized armchair and making sure the bluetooth headphones worked right, but that’s a daydream for another day.
Also, every creative person has probably gotten themselves into the situation of trying to finish 23 complicated craft projects in the 23 days before Christmas, meaning you hide away from all your nearest and dearest and emerge from your room with frazzled hair to shove cereal into your mouth, muttering something about, “Must embroider faster.”
This time, with five years of practice in rationing my energy, I decided that my dozen most dear family members would get one small painting, one embellished clothing item and one thing that I designed and others made, like stickers and photo books. I started October first with the small paintings, and by using watercolors, which go faster, succeeded in finishing them by mid-November. Then I focused on thrifting flannels and sweatshirts which could be spray-painted with stencils. By preparing them and working in batches, I got the hands-on work down to several afternoons. By cleverly planning my knitting pattern designs (on my other Substack, Notes from the Studio), I made presents for two family members.
Then I switched focus to the photos and books, ordering the single photos and frames, then settling down to lay out larger books of the year. This did result in some heartbreak when I learned that a glitch meant I received photo books with only eight pages of photos and 26 blank ones, and Shutterfly would only give me a partial refund. I’m still working on the new ones, using Mixbook. Boo, Shutterfly! The stickers worked well, though, with custom ones I created going down a treat, as they say in the UK.
Best of all, the time and energy I saved from multiple shopping trips and wrapping many small gifts meant that we could spend more family time together doing puzzles and watching weekend football games. I was able to bake goodies and make gift bags for 14 friends and neighbors, and deliver surprise candied pecans, sugar cookies and chocolate orange peels to family members before the 25th. And I even had enough time and energy left to try drawing on paper mache and wood slice ornaments in the last week, which I discovered I loved.
Giving charitable donations is the work of a few moments, and I introduced participation elements in the presentation, hiding things about the house on the day and giving clues about where they could be found, or asking someone to tell a funny story before getting the gifts. Another Best of All, my parents volunteered to host Christmas Eve and my brother’s family had us over on the festive morning, so those both came off my plate.
The result was a holiday season with much less stress and more fun. Huzzah!
Wishing you all a belated Happy New Year, and take care.
Jaala
