This year will be different

Every year when the holidays roll around I face an internal struggle between capturing the magic of the past and experiencing something fresh.

No two Christmases have been exactly alike, but there has been enough of a thematic throughline that my boys have expectations that we do specific activities in a certain order: Thanksgiving, breakfast out before buying the Christmas tree and decorating the house, Peter Mayer concert at Smoke Rise, Christmas Eve service at Parkway, Christmas Day with presents and brunch at home, visit to the grandparents in Florida after Christmas, no-fuss New Year’s, take down decorations, rinse and repeat next November.

Here are the ways I’m anticipating the Wallace Family Christmas will be different in 2024:

Decorations. We recently overhauled our landscaping, and gone are the shrubberies that once held thousands of lights that made our home a shining beacon of hope and joy for the entire Lilburn community. I’m at a loss about what to do now.

Carla, whose decorating tastes I have come to trust and rely on to bring beauty to my life in a way I am incapable of doing for myself, had the audacity to suggest we swirl them around on the ground. I insisted it would just look like I had given up on decorating and left them lying strewn about like someone who started to put up lights but gave up. No, lights must be on bushes and trees or else line up neatly on architectural features of your home, not swirled in a messy mish-mash of strands and bulbs. Think about what that would like in the 29 minutes of daylight we have this time of year.

I’m tempted to go back to adorning our front porch railings with lighted garland. We did that for a few years, and it had a nice effect. But then we got really into spotlights which overpowered the strings of tiny lights and made them feel superfluous. Now when I set out the spotlights and turn them on for the first time, if I’m not careful, I will blind myself and be unable to watch television or drive for three days until I am visited by a man named Ananias.

Stay tuned for more on this developing story, or just drive by house and judge us.

Food. I do not have an emotional relationship with food. However, I must have that pineapple congealed salad at Thanksgiving my mom always made, and at Christmas, I become the Cookie Monster. Seriously. Like, I love cookies. 

For many years we participated in our church’s cookie swap. And by “we” I mean Carla made 37 dozen cookies, took them to the event and returned home with 8,321 cookies that the boys and I promptly scarfed down. I know the real meaning of Christmas, but I have to confess that when Carla arrived at the house after the cookie swap, I felt a stronger urge to sing “O Holy Night” than I do on Christmas Eve.

This year, though, my aging metabolism is conspiring against me in a way that has made cookies the enemy. There are no nutritional benefits to cookies, and I am cutting back. Since my knees won’t let me run anymore, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for me to walk off the calories I will ingest if I indulge my cookie obsession.

You heard it here first: Lance is cutting back on the cookies.

Travel. Since I wed the former Carla Barron in May of 1997, I have spent Christmas with her family and post-Christmas up until and often including New Year’s with my family. There have been a few times we had to change that up, like when Barron’s birth was imminent and Carla didn’t buy into my idea of recreating the journey of Mary and Joseph when she was “great with child.” That year we went to Lake Wales at Thanksgiving and my dad and youngest brother came up to visit us while Mom stayed home with Maw Maw. It was a different year, to be sure.

Then there was the year Carla’s mom ended up in the hospital on Christmas Day and the year Barron brought COVID back from a wedding. No Florida trips those years, but otherwise, we’ve been post-Christmas travelers for awhile.

This year, though, in order to accommodate my boys’ work and relational schedules, we are going to Lake Wales before Christmas. This will mean we miss my brother Lyle and his family, who will journey from Texas to visit our folks after Christmas, but I made the difficult decision that it was more important to get all of our boys to the grandparents rather than just some of us going afterwards. Besides, Lyle doesn’t know it yet, but to make up for it, I’m planning to bring the whole family out to stay with his family for six weeks this summer. (Don’t tell him! It’ll be a fun surprise.)

We’ll enjoy seeing Granny and Paw Paw, make it back home in time for Christmas Eve service and for Santa to visit, and then the older boys will scatter to wherever their women folk take them. It’s fine, and we want them to venture forth into the world. I plan to take lots of naps after Christmas and walk around the yard in the dark admiring the swirls of lights.

Gifts. Because we’re in that liminal state between buying our kids lots of Christmas gifts and having grandkids to buy lots of gifts for, gifts just don’t feel like a priority. Yes, Harris will always have a list longer than a CVS receipt, but in general, our gift giving has gotten very practical. I literally refrain from buying stuff I need from July to December so I can give my family gift recommendations for me because they insist I’m hard to buy for… “Well, I could use some new staples and a toothbrush.”

This year, I’m not going to resort to spending money just for the sake of spending money. I will spend time and thought instead, and make gift purchases that fit my loved one, not just take up space under the tree. I bought Carla an electric leaf blower for her birthday back in November, and she has been so happy with it, I’m thinking she might need other tools. Talk about different! I can shop for her gift at Lowe’s and Home Depot and skip the fancy stores with embarrassing arrays of ladies’ underthings spread all out in the open.

If you are on my gift list this year, watch out. You never know what you may get.

No matter how you plan to observe the holiday season in 2024, I hope you and yours have a merry time of it. I think it can still be the most wonderful time of the year, even if it’s a little different from how we’ve always done it.