After a long day of work last week, I randomly decided I wanted to put up my Christmas tree. I am an avid Christmas lover and I love to decorate for the holidays. My 15-year old daughter was appalled. She couldn’t believe I was putting the tree up before Thanksgiving and said I was breaking tradition. In some ways I thought maybe she was right. It’s early November…would my Christmas tree take precedence over our Thanksgiving dinner? Would the Christmas décor somehow dampen the mood? Either way, I began unloading it out the box. My daughter, in the background, was still telling me how silly I was for doing this so early.
Finally, after some time of me fluffing the branches and connecting the cords, it lit up. My daughter came into the living room and looked at the sight of the twinkling lights, and said in a daze, “Wow, it’s beautiful.” My five-year-old ran up the steps, eyes lit up with excitement, wondering when we could begin to decorate. Her face, his excitement, and the sense of calm that came over us as we admired the tree was exactly why I put it up.
We needed that moment.
The moral of the so-called “premature” decorating is that we need to do all the things that make us happy. This year has been one of loss, change, and heaviness for so many people. We are in the aftermath of one of the most intense elections in history. That Christmas tree did something for my household. Even my husband, who is typically our household grinch and could care less about décor, said he liked the tree.
I shared a meme on Facebook that read, “Go ahead and put that Christmas tree up. Nothing makes sense anyways.” Because so many things in life don’t make sense, we sometimes have to step out of “tradition” and make ourselves happy. Life is hard and we have to find pieces of happiness in the small things in life because the big things can overwhelm us. Whether that looks like early holiday decorating, buying some new sheets for your bedroom, or eating crab legs instead of turkey on Thanksgiving, we have to make things make sense for us and our families.
