December 1, 2022

Holiday (Good) Burdens

We can pick and choose our seasonal (good) burdens. Halloween, for instance, for me, is barely a blip on the calendar, except for the week or so afterwards replete with tiny chocolate bars. No seasonal decorations at my house, I don’t dress up, my children dress up just barely—this year my youngest put an old shade on her head and went out as a lamp. I’m just not that invested in the rituals, which is not to say that they’re not meaningful, but just that they don’t hold meaning for me, and that’s fine. (I return once again to the ancient pre-internet art of not liking something without it being a manifesto.)

Christmas, on the other hand, I’m big into, in a secular fashion, but still I’m picking and choosing where my energy goes, and it doesn’t go as far as, say, homemade advent calendars. I actually aspire to be a creator of homemade advent calendars, but I’ve accepted that I’d need to be a different human for that to happen, someone more fond of shopping and crafting than I am. And speaking of crafting, homemade gifts are another item that won’t be ticked off my list anytime soon. I’ve accepted my limits, the realities of ROI, and—as Christina Cook writes in her book Good Burdens, which I think about a lot—deciding not to do certain things (JOMO—the Joy of Missing Out!) leaves room for those other things that really matter.

Which, for me, include writing and sending Christmas cards, something that’s particularly important to me as we live far from so many friends and family. I’ve been writing Christmas cards for 20 years now, since the very first Christmas I spent away from home, and I continue to see these cards—even with their notes rather hastily scrawled!—as a way to show people near and far to us that they matter. (It also means that we get a lot of Christmas cards in return, though I also completely understand when other people don’t reciprocate, in fact I respect those who’ve made deliberate choices and peace with Christmas cards being on their JOMO list.)

I also love Christmas baking, and creating a homemade gingerbread house, and reading Christmas stories with my kids, and the coziness of winter knitting projects, and fashioning the leftovers of a roasted turkey into every kind of leftover imaginable. These are the kinds of jobs I like to be doing.

One further thing that’s important to me during the holidays is small tokens of appreciation for members of our community, my kids’ teachers, and piano teachers, and crossing guards, and girl guide leaders, and sometimes I drive myself a little bit crazy trying to cross everything off on this list and something I adore about my husband (on a very long list of things) is how he saw that I was finding this good burden a little overwhelming but didn’t use my overwhelm as an excuse to devalue this labour. Instead of saying, “If it’s stressing you out so much, why do you do it?” (a too familiar pattern in heterosexual partnerships, I think?) he supported me in finding ways to make the job easier, which is why, for the past three years, I’ve purchased holiday gift bundles from local fave Carolina’s Brownies, and my husband has shrugged and said, “Yes, of course, you’re spending hundreds of dollars on gourmet brownies for the crossing guard.” (He also made the address labels for my Christmas cards. He’s truly the best, and goes out of the way to help me with my good burdens, even when they’re not as important to him, but, you see, *I* am important to him.)

“Let’s make this a season of humble gestures that light up the world,” is a thought that occurred to me this morning as I photographed a green Christmas bauble fastened to a twiggy tree, someone else’s gesture that added sparkle to my morning.

There can be meaning in all these things if we choose to be deliberate in our choices.

How wonderful that we get to pick and choose our seasonal (good) burdens.