Each year, the happy bustle of putting up Christmas decorations with our adult children foretells a more melancholy ritual, scheduled to take place in only a couple of weeks. After guests have decamped and visitors passed through, Nigel and I pack the baubles and tinsels carefully away.
Increasingly the Ghost of Putting Away has started to haunt
the afternoon in Advent when we hang up the tinsel and fairy lights. Before Christmas has even happened, I begin
to anticipate my nostalgia at its passing.
The reason lies in what Christmas means to us. It has a significance beyond the religious one.
It is a time when we reenact an earlier stage in our family’s life cycle,
living happily together as a nuclear family of five. Truthfully family life probably never was as
perfect as it is at Christmas, but that is beside the point.
But the outcome is that when, after Christmas, the children
all return to their homes, it reenacts the moment when they became adults and
flew the nest - the paradoxical moment
at which a parent both congratulates themselves, but also feels quite sad.
However, as we get older, time is passing even faster and weirdly there is a comfort in that. Not only does the end of Christmas seem immanent right from the middle of December. But now the start of next Christmas seems close, even though it is only January. I can foresee myself getting the decorations out again in only a few months, so I repair some little wooden ornaments, knowing I will need them quite soon.
It hardly seems worth Nigel carting the great cardboard
Christmas boxes into the loft. Christmas will be back again before we know
it.
