By Holly Kozelsky
“Silent night, holy night” – “Peace on earth, good will to men” – “on a cold winter’s night that was so deep …”
Naw, it wasn’t the peace of Christmas we created by our ambitious plan to get it all done in one weekend. It was utter chaos.
If our Christmas house had music playing in it right now, it would be the really fast part of “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses or “Carol of the Bells” by the heavy metal group Orion’s Reign.
The Christmas season in a well ordered, decorated, prepared home is Christmas magic indeed. Magic, because it only seems to happen by wave of a wand. You can work and work and work yourself into exhaustion and still not get everything Christmassy done.
Every year, I don’t get done everything I want to, but I still manage to fulfill about 80% of the Christmas traditions. It’s a different 80% each year, so when you add up a few years in a row, we get it all in.
There’s all the special homemade foods – the Christmas crafts (decorated cookies, cloves stuck in oranges in decorative patterns, etc.) – trimming the tree, setting out all the decorations and hanging all the garland and lights (both inside and out – urgh!) – writing and sending out Christmas cards – and, of course, the one thing you can’t get away with not getting around it, wrapping and, sometimes, mailing presents.
Whew, that’s quite some to-do list.
On top of that, there are all the Christmas parties and receptions and gatherings and celebrations and ceremonies and concerts we must go to.
Looking at it that way, it’s only fair that the week between Christmas and New Year’s is relatively quiet. We all need the rest.
Now that my daughter is a teenager, I knew we’d have to be completely regimented in how and when we did things. There are too many after-school activities, not to mention fun invitations from friends, with which the home life must compete for attention.
She agreed with the plan to get it all done on the first weekend after Thanksgiving.
We bought our Christmas trees late Wednesday. Purists, we did not bring them into the house on Thursday: We left them in their stands, standing sentry on either side of the front door to wait.
Friday night after work, we bought boxes down from storage. We put out some decorations and packed our regular decorations back into the Christmas boxes to keep our surfaces tidy and on theme. By bedtime Friday, strings of lights and pieces of tinsel, wrapping paper and ribbon were scattered about.
Saturday, we thinned out a tree, leaving our porch scattered with branches we swore we’d make into wreaths. We tested out strings of Christmas lights to see which worked and which didn’t and went through the tedium of finding the bad bulbs. We decorated that tree, accidentally broke three ornaments, laughed at the cats’ delight at all the crinkly paper and flash and shine. More tinsel and pine cones and gift tags had spread themselves somehow throughout the downstairs rooms. We chopped cranberries and nuts and juiced oranges and cooked the traditional Christmas bread. Boy does that make a mess of the kitchen. My back ached and my feet hurt and I was tired.
Sunday, we set out more decorations and did final Christmas shopping complete with a ladies lunch, and then we decorated the other tree. The ornaments we don’t like enough to use this year but aren’t yet ready to throw away are on this table. The lights that don’t work but we think we can fix are on that table. Somehow, tinsel is all up and down the hall. We removed the dining room table centerpiece and tablecloth and set out the gifts and some wrapping supplies. We lost and found the scissors and tape three times. We figured it was prudent to make the fruitcake and get it in the oven before starting to wrap, since it takes a long time to bake.
After we and counters were dusted in flour, and the cutting board sticky and bowls dirty, we slipped the fruitcakes into the oven. By then it was 7 p.m. and the cakes would take 3 ½ hours to bake at a low temperature.
We went into the dining room and picked up wrapping paper. Then we set it back down.
We looked around the room in dismay. The energy that had so bolstered us up was completely gone.
Defeated, we turned off the light and left the room.
It was all I could do to stay awake until 10:30 p.m. to get the cakes out of the oven.
We got a lot done, but it wasn’t yet ready to be enjoyed because the house was in an explosion of a mess. It was not going to be fun coming home on Monday evening after school and work, to all that mess.
Looking back at all we had accomplished that weekend – not everything we planned, but a decent amount – I had to give myself credit for another great accomplishment.
The brandy only went into the fruitcake, and none into me, no matter how much it could be said I deserved it.
