Earlier this year, this sign came home with me from Hobby Lobby. Being a crafter, I appreciate and value handmade items and how much more meaningful they are when gifts are handmade rather than from a store. I thought I’d hang it in my craft room as a good reminder that the holiday, and the gifts, mean more than the things that come from a store. And, naturally, it hangs right above my sewing machine where I can see it while I sit in my craft room and make things.
But seeing it hanging there is hitting me a bit differently today.
I don’t normally do Black Friday shopping. But I like to venture out, later in the weekend, to try to finish up some gift shopping. There’s this fine line I walk between hating how commercial and materialistic the holidays can be, but at the same time, I can’t really deny that there’s this overall vibe when going out the weekend after Thanksgiving. Stores are busy, everyone bustling around, Christmas obviously in the air and it can be exciting. While the stores put out holiday items well before Halloween, it always feels like the weekend after Thanksgiving is when the holiday season has officially begun.
This year… was very much different. We went out for a bit, picking up some winter crafts at Michaels to keep us occupied these next few weeks along with a holiday gift project for my kiddo to make for everyone. We stopped by World Market to replenish our tea supply for winter (chocolate peppermint tea has been my son’s favorite this autumn). We don’t go out all that much right now, obviously, so it was a bit of an indulgence to allow ourselves to try to go out and not be cooped up in the house quite as much. Trying to hold onto a scrap of normalcy, I suppose. But it all felt so off, energy-wise. The stores weren’t busy as usual and the energy that is there every holiday season was missing. I’m not going to lie, even though I’m glad to see so many people choosing to stay home, it was also a little depressing.
In the back of my mind, I knew this was going to be a weird holiday season. There’s no way it wouldn’t be weird with a pandemic raging. And, knowing how weird things are this year, it would only make sense that the holidays would be scaled back, too. Knowing it would be weird is why I decided to actually push myself to make as many holiday gifts as I possibly could – but it’s bigger than all of that. The reality is that no one in my family needs a gift. Not really, anyway.
We’ve been forced to re-evaluate and re-examine what’s actually important to us. And, for a lot of us, it’s actually having time to see our families and friends over the materialistic things that we thought we all wanted. And I suppose that’s really the silver lining to focus on here: that we’re all finally figuring out what’s really important in our lives and it isn’t a bunch of material goods filling up our houses that we’ll forget about in weeks and months. Instead, it’s the people around us that we’ve taken for granted for so long. It’s finding ways to still “see” our tribe, if even over a screen, and giving up the in-person hugs and affection we take for granted.
So, for real this year, Christmas isn’t coming from a store. Because this year, after so much isolation and avoiding interactions with our people, it means a little bit more.
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