I base a lot of my decisions on how they will affect others, completely disregarding my own feelings. This is not a humble brag about my selflessness. It's me admitting that my pride leads me to believe that I am much stronger than I am and life's difficulties will simply roll off of me like water on a duck. That's a bad metaphor, but you get my point.
Which is how I found myself sobbing into my husband's chest at 11:55 pm on Christmas Eve.
Let's back up a bit.
Soon after we got married, Matt and I were discussing how to split the holidays. Knowing his mother, I texted her and asked her to choose between having us for Thanksgiving or Christmas this year. She chose Christmas, and I remember thinking to myself (and possibly saying to Matt), "She has feelings about this, I don't/won't, it's just Christmas." So we did Thanksgiving at my parents' house, and Christmas in Perry where I, much to my surprise, cried more in a day than I've cried in the past two years.
Wait. Let's back up a bit more.
The Swanson family has Christmas traditions that are both fiercely guarded and deeply held. Some of them we don't even like that much, we just do them because dang it, it's Christmas so Cory MUST over-spice the chili.
The gentlemen of the family spend Christmas Eve around the kitchen table while the ladies cook and I contribute sassy comments into whatever conversation I can (it's tradition). On Christmas Eve-ning, we eat soup (three options - the over-spiced chili, some kind of chowder, and a wild card of my choosing) and go to Mass, where we listen to the same story of our salvation and sing Gloria like it's going out of style. We take silly pictures in front of the tree, eat cookies from a gift basket, and watch three movies before hanging our stockings and going to bed - The Toy that Saved Christmas, The Grinch (complete with snippets of old commercials from when my grandmother recorded it on TNT in the late 80s!), and A Christmas Story - all on VHS. During the movies, Trey sits on the stairs, I sit by my dad, and everyone I hold dearest in this world is close enough to kick (except Trey) and I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I think Christmas Eve might be my favorite day of the year.
On Christmas morning, we all pile into my brothers' bedroom at around 7:40 and wait patiently until 8, when we descend the stairs in reverse age order pausing occasionally for pictures before tearing into our stockings. After stockings, we feast on a breakfast of scrambled eggs, cinnamon rolls and bacon to fuel us for The Opening of Presents - an event that takes approximately three hours because we open them one-by-one and there are a million people in my family. The rest of Christmas Day is a blur to me...there's a nap, some more board games for the men/cooking for the women, then a large meal mid-afternoon.
It is all a well-oiled, very comforting, machine.
Christmas 1993, aka the beginning of my deep love for old men.
I didn't realize now how much I cherished these silly traditions until this year. Christmas in Perry was fun. We ate a good dinner and went bowling on Christmas Eve, but the mere thought of my dad's face would put me in tears. I missed my brothers and sister. I missed my uncle and Granddad and mom. I missed listening to the bickering over Monopoly and I'm certain they missed my sass and apple pie. I wanted chili and board games and all of our traditions, and I was crying about it because it didn't feel like Christmas (side note: I know this is ridiculous and childish because the birth of Christ and celebration thereof trumps whether or not you eat very specific foods or watch certain movies).
But this is just the thing about growing up. Life changes and Christmas will change right along with it. As my siblings get married and move away, they too will alternate between my parents and their in-laws. We'll all have children and start to do our own things at our own houses and my parents will hop around. This makes me want to throw things. I want our old Christmas! I want marching down the stairs in matching pajamas! I want to squeeze one of my brother's hands as hard as I can in Mass because that's just what we do!
Time will continue regardless of me throwing things. There is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. But what I do is bask in the honestly incredible memories of twenty-two Christmases with my weirdly structured/loud/soup-eating family, and look forward with excitement and gratitude to creating new traditions with my husband and our future children.
So, after getting out a good cry, Matt rented A Christmas Story for me on Amazon, and we stayed up together into the wee hours of Christmas morning watching it - him for the first time, me for the umpteenth. The next morning, we read from the Bible, opened all our presents at the same time, then our stockings, and headed out to Waffle House.
And it felt like Christmas because long ago a baby was born in stable and he changed the world. And that's what matters.
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