Coffee and Christmas

24 Days of Christmas-December 3, 2023

Hello its me…its been a while.

Everytime I had a good thought to write about or I thought I’d catch everyone up on life…I got busy or I got lazy. Its not hard to type out my words but at the same time…it is.

So I wanted to just have 24 short blogs leading up to Christmas.. Coffee and Christmas. Just some short thoughts…about life and the season and our family. Nothing major. I’ll catch you up in between paragraphs…as I go over the next 24 days.

Hold on a second..I need to get my packages off the porch. Amazon just showed up!

Okay so my cute little star lights showed up and I put them on the tree and of course…I need more. They only took a whole week to show up with amazon prime…so whats one more week?

Its funny how we have turned Christmas from something slightly unbearable to something I cannot recognize. I bet you never would have thought you would hop on your computer and order most of “christmas” even after you said you were going to only buy “local”. Right?!

Things change when you go from a kid to an adult and the to a parent.

As a kid we remember it all so lovingly..we don’t recall any stress or tension in the air that our parents experienced. We didn’t have money to buy gifts and we made ours in school for free. We remember fresh cut trees, ornaments..cookie making and of course, waking up early and having to wait at the top of the stairs til our parents wake and have coffee made. I mean we opened presents when it was still dark! I specifically remember pre-christmas wrapping for my Grandma who lived on the hill behind me. She paid me to wrap for all her kids and their kids (there was a lot). I also remember she had this bird that would sing when it detected motion and it was hidden in her little tree she set on her library table. She never had a full sized tree. She had multi-color lights, which normally I wouldn’t like but it was my grandma, she could do whatever and I’ll remember it with love. We gathered there Christmas day after our own Christmas and all the extended family was there in her single wide trailer, cracking nuts, and eating those striped hard candies that come in a tin. I loved it! LOVED it. This is what I didn’t know.

We got up up early and waited for my mom and dad to get up. My mom, spent weeks and even months making gifts or finding ways to make money to buy gifts because we didn’t have extra. We ripped through the gifts..and the stockings and ate breakfast…that she made. I’m pretty sure she cleaned up the mess while we played with our toys and then we got dressed and ran up the hill to the trailer while my mom got ready, probably alone…(which may have been the highite) and made some sort of snack or baked good to bring up to spend the majority of the day with her husbands side of the family. And then its done…right? All that time and effort…was done.

I really do try not to be a grinch. Mark teased me often but its because it falls on us (the moms!) to pull it all together. Just because I stayed home with the kids didn’t mean I could do it all alone. Its hard to plan it all…buy it all…wrap it all…hope they love them all..and the do all the meals and events as well. It’s just alot. Parts of it I will always love and parts I will not. Each year I want to do something drastically different. Forget the gifts..focus on family and events…but we have trained our kids. From birth. Expectations. I’m not sure I’l ever be able to change it. I have this “dream” where we rent a cabin…forgo the gifts expect for a few of course, to have under the tree, and just have a fire and read books, watch movies, play games, and go for winter walks. I wonder if it will ever happen.

I went into Grand Rapids today and there were alot of people there and I was reminded why we shop online.

But as I sat in church I asked myself how we got here. How did it go from celebrating Jesus’ birth to spending thousands (or hundreds…whatever, it’s alot) of dollars and going way out of our way, exhausting ourselves, for what seems to be a few hours? I mean, for me, they aren’t babies anymore. The hype is gone…but at the same time, its not.

This year…I attempted a trip. But after much thought, I decided it was exhausting and I’m not sure it would have been easier to do a trip vs gifts. The problem is I do truly want it all to be special. I don’t buy gifts to just buy gifts so my poor brain and heart go through so much emotion my kids will never know until they are in my shoes. Mark did help…he liked to buy gifts. He didn’t have alot of time. He LOVED online shopping. He would pick stuff up and be like “great, she’ll love it” and I’ll hym and haw over it for days and then talk myself out of the gift. Then I’ll overbuy for one and have to even it up and its never ending. I can’t wait for Christmas day so I have an ending point! I actually think about it all year but I am incapable of buying early. What if things change? What is their taste change? I wish I could. I wish I could buy, put on blinders and ear plugs and focus but I can’t. There are a few new things I’ve done this year I am excited about …I’ll let you know as it unfolds!

So since this is 3 days in one…

Today at church we focused on Phillipians 3:17-24? I started the sermon with tears and ended with tears. He used a story from his past about his dad. I’ve heard it before and I always loved it. I think Mark was alot like his dad…personality wise but he said everything felt fine and safe when his dad was there. (parralleling it with Christ) but I also feel like everything felt safe and secure when Mark was here. If I feel that way, how do my kids feel? How does Hatcher feel? I know we are to seek Christ as He is our true father but he did give us Mark…and how do you just continue on? When the blizzard comes…you still look for him to emerge out of the storm to carrry your bags.

And speaking of bags…what bags are you carrying? What are you lugging around that you could give to your “father” to carry for you. That one hit me hard. Like ALL of it. ALL of it. But I don’t. I just keep juggling it and adding one more to my back and my shoulder. One day I’ll fall over, I’ll hit the floor….I won’t be able to carry anymore. Will I finally let go? Or will I just make mulitple trips (with a really poor attitude) to get it all where I’m trying to take it. And where the heck is that? Where am I going? What am I doing?

Food for thought.