New Year, New Home
We finally moved into our permanent home. Also, am I the only adult who feels the Christmas Day let down?
I’ve spent the last few months drafting half of a post and then discarding it. Life has been too full and my thoughts too scattered. After a few weeks of thinking I should have spent my time head-down posting as much as possible to meet the 24 posts in 2024 I originally set out for, I have allowed that expectation to go. Perhaps I will finish this one and I’ll end 2024 with an even 20 posts published.
If you had asked me last December whether I was going to moved to a new city with my family in 2024, I would have told you no. When we finally made the decision to commit in early May my whole year changed. All of the plans I had for my free time, for Substack, for what our future would hold were upended.
I am so pleased and grateful to say that after four months moving from AirBnB to AirBnB, my family has moved into our permanent home. We’ve been here for about a month now. It still feels strange to call it ours. I still have some nights where I lie awake feeling anxious about our safety. (We are completely safe, but I can’t be the only parent who has paranoid thoughts of fires or other disasters at night.) But every day we make another little improvement to the house, we organize another room, we bring something else out from storage. Each day it feels a little bit more like ours. I’m looking forward to making the yard feel like mine this spring as well. It has relatively few garden beds, so I have dreams of planting new trees, establishing native plant gardens, and minimizing the amount of lawn.
Gratitude acknowledged, I would not recommend moving into a new home a few days before Thanksgiving and spending the entire holiday season trying to manage the holiday season AND repair and organize a new home. It is not for the faint of heart. (Good thing I have that pacemaker.)
I gave myself a lot of grace. My children did not do as much crafting of homemade presents for family and friends. We did not do as much baking. Presents were bought at least a month later than usual. But it didn’t matter, we had family over to visit, we had yummy treats and we had gifts for our family of four. That’s all that was needed. I am proud of myself—almost eight years into this parenting thing—proud that I was able to let go of doing every tradition, or doing it all perfectly. I’m proud to be a “good enough” mother, just like all of those articles and podcasts I soothed myself with during early motherhood said.
On Christmas Day while watching my children explore their gifts from Santa and unwrap their other presents, I was struck by a familiar feeling. I have had it most Christmases since becoming a parent, and yet, I forget it every year… disappointment. I wonder if other adults and/or parents can relate. Somehow after all of the effort to plan gifts, adhere to holiday traditions and have family fun, I am always struck by how underwhelming it all plays out on Christmas morning. It’s not that I did too much or spent hours fantasizing about something far different from reality. In fact, this year, with our recent move, I’ve done less than ever before (as mentioned above). And yet, when my children saw their gifts from Santa I felt the familiar, “This is it?”
I wonder if it's borne from some nostalgia for how Christmas felt to me as a child. I remember how difficult it was when I was first treated as an adult at Christmas, how all of the magic seemed sucked out of the room. Christmas began to feel like any other day, no luster, no excitement. Some of that magic came back when I became a parent. I could be the creator of magic, but I always feel melancholy by 9am on Christmas morning. I generally recover soon after breakfast, when the day is more open. Or perhaps my disappointment transforms into overwhelm at being asked to play with every new game or help with a sewing kit or read the instructions for a toy when I just wanted to floss and pee 30 minutes ago. All this is interspersed with true moments of joy and connection, of course. This isn’t exactly about a post about the mental load of the holiday season that falls on women, but a reflection on what feelings come up for me each year.
I know I can’t be the only parent who feels let down on Christmas morning. It’s not that I expect my children to act more excited, or I insist they are more grateful (I actually got tired of my oldest thanking me repeatedly for a doll). It’s just that somehow reality just gets too real. The fuzzy anticipation of the season is over. While the end of the holiday season is a relief, it also leaves me wondering what there is to look forward to over the remaining cold winter months. Yes, yes, there is New Year’s Eve and a promise of a new year. Perhaps this Christmas let down is part of why we are all so obsessed with starting over at New Years. I do use this time to reflect and think ahead, to dream and plan, but New Year’s doesn’t give the same kind of fuzzy anticipatory magic that Christmas does.
I imagine as my children get older my Christmas let down will get worse and worse. It’s not that this transition is inherently bad. I simply feel disappointed on Christmas morning because I am nostalgic for the innocence and hope of my own childhood Christmases. There are so few places left in our world that feel magical. Where we are allowed to fully sit in wonder and playful optimism.
I want to continue to cultivate that where I can, though I know I will be pushing hard against my tendency toward anxiety and worst-case scenarios. Where is the balance between pushing for resolutions and traditions and relaxing into the magic that may be present around you at this very moment? The tension between needing to show up to see the magic and being attuned enough to receive it fully. It feels like just another permutation of a thousands of years long question, balancing yin and yang, or type A and type B, etc.
As the calendar swiftly pushes me into the new year, I am trying to remain flexible. So many of the plans for this “break” have been pushed by illness, weather, or home improvement schedules. I will not start 2025 completely ready to go on a “whole new” anything. But, I will fall back on the grace I showed myself earlier this month1 and find some faith that I will find my way into the goals and projects that are important to me. Perhaps, I will even practice staying present enough to see magic.
How do you usually feel at 9am Christmas morning? Where do you find magic to anticipate in your day-to-day life?
All images published in Stutter Over Silence are original artwork created by the author, Katie Gresham, unless otherwise noted.
This is me showing myself grace by not forcing myself to find time in the last 9 hours of 2024 to drawing another illustration for this post. I had a cute mother and minions Christmas idea, but maybe next year. Instead follow my example and find something to just not do today.
It’s not just you.