There’s a strange thing that happens to me when I get to Dallas for Christmas. The Christmas season always feels over.
My parents’ house is decorated, there are lights on the houses in the neighborhood, we go Christmas shopping and decide what we’ll bake. But I have to remind myself that we still have five days to go until Christmas Day.
This is something that used to happen to me when I was in ballet. We spend so much time rehearsing for our Christmas show that by the time we finished it at the end of Thanksgiving week, Christmas itself felt done. Now, we live in Washington and spend the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas running errands, going skating, seeing snow, baking up a storm, and then we give our kids presents to open before we leave.
We make a festive breakfast, spend the whole day together, have cocoa and the cookies we baked, and generally just have our own little Christmas. After that, I feel the post-Christmas let down, and have to remind myself that lo and behold, I have a whole other set of Christmas celebrations!