Today I am like the Christmas lawn ornaments that now lay face down and flat on lawns throughout our town. Whether Santa or Snoopy in a snow globe, these balloon sculptures have been left forgotten and unfilled now that we are a few days past Christmas and almost ready to ring in a New Year.
I LOVE the Christmas season. I LOVE making lists, shopping for just the right giflts, decorating the house, writing Christmas cards, wrapping, procuring and preparing our traditional Scandinavian foods, and having time to read and relax. And the thing I cherish most of all is being together with my family. Our children are grown now, so for most of the year they are busy leading their own amazing lives. But when Christmas comes, they come home and they stay for a while. We decorate the tree together, shop and wrap together, cook and eat together, talk together, go on adventures together, read on the couches together, and see lots of movies together (This year we saw The Favourite, Vice, and Mary Queen of Scots, along with Christmas favorites including It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, Santa Clause, and Charlie Brown’s Christmas.). Over the week, we settle in to a nice rythm, and everything feels so right. This year we ended the week with a fantastic day in New York City. We saw The Magic Flute at the Metroplotian Opera House, stopped for a glass of wine at a bar where my daughter knows the bartender, walked through Central Park to see the Christmas windows at Bergdorf Goodman (as we do each and every year) and went out to a fabulous (and probably too expensive) dinner in SoHo. We walked, we laugher, we enjoyed. As the night came to a close, I felt closer to my two daughters than I’ve ever felt before (and we are pretty close).
And then the time came. The time to drive them back to their apartments in Chinatown and South Park Slope. The time to drop them off with all of their new Christmas loot. The time to send them back to their own lives…and me back to mine.
Today it’s quiet. The tea kettle isn’t boiling for my daughter’s tea. The music isn’t on. It’s just me, my husband and the dog on the couches. I’m feeliing a bit deflated and like I’m lying face down on my front lawn.