“Our” Christmas

This year, when I opened the box of Christmas decorations, there was something new wrapped in with the ornaments and tucked into the stockings: the sweet/sad awareness that the snapshot I now know to be our family’s holiday norm is fading fast.

Mary Hannah came back in time for Thanksgiving, and will be with us at least through February. That’s when she’ll return to Idaho for what could be a quick 10-day intensive course … or could be the gateway to the apprenticeship she needs to go along with her ongoing classes and cement her qualifications as a Certified Professional Midwife. I’d be lying if I said I’m perfectly at peace with her not coming back at all; who is ever ready to put their child on a plane and whisper, “Until whenever“?

But even that — the looming spectre of a more permanent move to Idaho, or anywhere that a willing midwife preceptor might be— pales in comparison to the realization that I was only 17 when I met my intended husband. I was 21 when we married.

My daughter is now 18.

In my mind, I have to face that truly, Mary Hannah could meet (or realize she already knows) the man God has for her any day now. It’s no longer a distant “some day,” though a wedding is likely not just around the corner. At 18, I have to acknowledge that she might just find herself looking at The One sooner rather than later. She’s not a child. She’s in the season where everything changes in a blink — and that blink ripples to us all.

This was my heart as I uncovered the “Baby’s First Christmas 1997” ornament and pressed it into her hand. How many more years will that sweet little reminder hang on the tree that is currently ours but will, some day, be Mom’s and Dad’s to all of my children?

I can’t help but remember the early years of our family, when the tree was sparse not because the bulk of our trinkets were boxed in a storage facility nearly 3,000 miles away (yes, this is our reality) but because everything was so fresh, so new. There were no clothespin reindeer, no styrofoam cup bells rolled in glitter, no crooked crosses lashed together with embroidery thread. Everything was red and white, and matched, and looked just exactly as I had dreamed.

In the intervening years, the illusion was strong that the tree we were building — the cluttered, in-progress hodge podge work of so many artists — would always be.  Surely, the branches would always groan under the weight of salt dough handprints. Surely, I would add nearly a dozen button-and-twig confections every year until the end of time.

Of course, I was wrong.

Over the next two decades or so, I will carefully, purposefully, lovingly take part in the dismantling of the tree we have built over twenty years of marriage. With each new wedding, I will gather boxes and sort out the items I once took for granted as “ours,” parceling them out to the rightful owners of those memories that they so generously allowed me to be part of. I will present them to sons made into husbands and daughters made into wives.

I will no longer pass by First Christmas ornaments, or paper plate angels in my own living room. I will once again have a color scheme, and a tree worthy of those glossy magazines that purport to tell us what beautiful looks like. And, if I am blessed to have adult children living nearby, I will walk into their warm, happy homes and see those Christmas memories again, hanging alongside the creations of my grandchildren. I will lean down and listen as they tell me about the care they took in choosing which beads to push on to the pipe cleaner, and I will marvel at the gift I will have received in seeing my life as a mother through spring, summer, and fall.

Who know how much longer we have with all of us — minus Babita — claiming this as Our Christmas, as How We Do Things? I can’t begin to guess. But for now, where I stand in the summer of my motherhood, I am appreciating all the moments before they slip through my hands.