I didn’t expect to think of the Fraggles when reading about Indigenous perspectives on the environment, but that’s just how my brain works. Despite the weird connection, it gave me a new perspective on how I can treat holiday gifts and in fact, our whole community in the year to come.
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To me, this is America.
To me, America should be celebrating the beautiful diversity of our country. It should be celebrating that people come from different backgrounds and experiences. It should be recognizing that people look and act different from each other and being amazed at how wonderful that is.
When I close my eyes during Christmastime, I see my parents’ house, with its fresh tree with white twinkling lights, ornaments from my childhood dangling off it. My dad has classic rock on in the background, either from an ancient speaker system or the TV, depending on what memory I’m drawing from. In the kitchen, my mom is making a gingerbread house with my older son, placing marshmallows just-so.
Closing them again, I see my in-laws’ house, all singing animatronics, baskets of candy, and holiday music. I’m lounging with my husband’s family on their brown plaid couch, gazing at the multi-colored lights. It’s not quite as familiar as my own parents’ house, but is still embedded in my heart and mind.
But when I open my eyes, none of that is present. It’s not even accessible – neither my parents or my in-laws live in those houses anymore.
Yet, despite that loss, it feels like we’re finally home for Christmas. That’s because this is the first year my husband and I have celebrated Christmas with our kids in our own house.
“This is the last Christmas we’re all going to be together!” my mother-in-law opines each year. This year, it was finally true. My parents left upstate New York last summer and my in-laws will be moving out West in the spring. So we had to make the most of our final holiday season in our hometown.
Here are a few memorable scenes from our Christmas vacation, both good and bad:
“Goodnight, Baby Jesus. Goodnight, mommy. Goodnight, daddy,” Sprout said to his nativity, addressing Mary and Joseph. While his theology wasn’t quite right, I love how he personally identifies with the story. That intimacy with the characters is something I’m actually learning from him this Advent season.
Sitting around the Thanksgiving table, letting the food settle before dessert, was prime storytelling time in my family. At my aunt’s house in New Jersey, we’d cram as many chairs as we could around the table. Instead of focusing on the vastly different places family members ended up, we looked to the past. Even outside of holidays, my family often shared stories, of struggles and triumphs, of funny incidents and serious ones.
As an adult, I now see that these stories influenced my values so much more than any amount of lecturing would have. In fact, children who hear family stories about both good and bad times have more resilience in the face of difficult circumstances than those who don’t. Here are a few of my family’s stories and the values they passed on to me.
Getting kids outside has a whole host of benefits, from stronger immune systems to the sheer joy of play. While sometimes all that’s needed is a stick and a bit of imagination, having certain gear can help bringing kids outside easier, safer and more fun. Whether you’re in the mountains or your own backyard, this gift guide – which is mainly focused on kids in preschool and elementary school – should provide a few helpful suggestions. (Note – none of these are affiliate or sponsored links, just products and/or companies I personally like.)
This Easter is a little different from usual, as we’ve never had a week-old baby around while celebrating it. Sprout was almost a year old by the time of his first Easter, so he had a bit more comprehension of the world by then. At this point, Little Bird is strictly interested in eating, sleeping, and pooping. He’s hardly awake enough to register anything else.
But we still have a near three-year-old who is more than aware of the idea of candy, even if the concept of the Christian resurrection is beyond him. Fortunately, both we and the grandparents were more than willing to oblige his interest in sweets. He’s also old enough to do crafts, especially after a successful color-mixing activity during the blizzard, so egg-dyeing was a definite must.
The Great Blizzard of 2016. Snowzilla. Ragsnowrok. Whatever you called it, the D.C. area got several tons of snow this past weekend. (Chris estimated that he shoveled approximately two tons of snow alone.) Specifically, we received at least 2 and a half feet of snow, putting us at more than double of what Anchorage usually accumulates in the entire month of January.
Our biggest fear was losing power to the house. Both Chris and I are from upstate New York, so we’re used to getting a decent amount of snow. The first year I ever spent Christmas night at his parents’ house was because they invited my parents over for dinner and we physically couldn’t get the car out of the driveway. But we were also here for Snowmageddon in 2010, when we lost heat to our apartment for three days. Thankfully, we could drive up and stay with our friends in Baltimore who had heat. Between being much further from the highway and our friends no longer living there, we would have no such recourse this time around.
By Saturday morning, we were already past 20 inches according to our makeshift snow ruler.
Games, Baking and Other Distractions
We resorted to playing the first of many, many rounds of the Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game. Or as Sprout calls it, the “Neeky nacky quirrel game.” While it’s a cute game and I definitely appreciate that he likes his Christmas gift, any game that a two-year-old is capable of playing gets repetitive very quickly. One of the few saving graces is that he says, “Thank you neeky nacky quirrel” each time he gets an acorn, which is both astonishingly cute and polite. It also helps that he doesn’t actually get that losing is a bad thing yet.
We’re usually out-and-about on weekends, so I took advantage of being stuck inside to do one of the five zillion projects with Sprout that I have mentally bookmarked. I’m always encouraging Chris to cook with him, so I pulled out the recipe for Easy Cheesy Crackers I remembered seeing on 100 Days of Real Food. Because I wasn’t going for “easy snack” so much as “indoor activity a toddler will enjoy,” we used cookie cutters to cut the crackers into cute shapes. The angels looked more like gingerbread men and the bears just looked like lumps, but Sprout didn’t really seem to care.
In terms of taste, they came out okay. In retrospect, I would have used regular flour instead of whole wheat. I’m pretty sure the 100 Days of Real Food author uses whole wheat in the recipe because it’s healthier, but the finished product had an unpleasant graininess. Also, completely disregard the suggestion on her page that this recipe in any way resembles Goldfish crackers. These are closer to savory cheese cookies, not the crunchy, puffy, addictive crackers. They’re fine on their own terms – especially if we made them with regular flour – but there’s no way any child will mistake these for Goldfish.
I can’t say everything we did was highly educational. I showed Sprout the video of Tien Tien sliding in the snow. It immediately became a source of obsession and a lot of whining to watch it again (and again and again).
I was able to indulge in this suburban housewife-ness because Chris took on all of the shoveling. Hauling huge amounts of snow isn’t exactly recommended for women who are more than six months pregnant, especially when restrictions kept me from picking up my own son until a month ago. While I felt bad for him, I was not exactly sad about my restrictions for once.
Out and Not-So-About
But as the snow kept falling, I got more antsy than Sprout. There’s a very good reason I’m not the stay-at-home parent, and even if I was, we’d never be at home. I needed to get out of the house, even if there wasn’t an actual path off of our property. Despite Sprout’s lack of enthusiasm, I eventually talked him into letting me put on his snowpants and new boots.
A not-snowman.
Unfortunately, the moment we stepped on the front porch, the wind whipped in our faces, feeling exactly like the 12 degrees F the weather reported. Sprout refused to move a step beyond the front door. He squatted for a few minutes while I tried to squash snow together into something snowman-shaped. Hearing his plaintive whimpers, I pulled him inside after less than 10 minutes, leaving a not-very-big lump of snow on the porch.
The snow stopped that night, but the next day was just as isolating.
Hello, snow. So much snow.
I wanted to get outside, but Sprout’s experience the day before had soured him on being outside. “Don’t you want to play in the snow?” I asked. “Naaah,” he replied.
With a sigh and a feeling that somehow this wasn’t my child, I snuck outside while Chris was taking a break from shoveling. Sprout’s been obsessed with the book The Snowman since he received it on Christmas Eve, so I made building one my mission even though the texture of the snow was completely wrong for it. Through the power of my own mitten-covered hands, I transformed the powdery substance into something moldable and eventually snowman-like.
Sprout acquiesced to venturing out in the afternoon, mainly because I promised him hot chocolate afterwards. Upon his request, I added my hat and a green scarf to the snowman to make him look even more like the book.
With some coaxing, we made our way down the street about a block, holding hands and dodging the bizarrely fast plow before turning around.
Job? What is this job you speak of?
The next two days were more of the same, except that I took a couple hours each day to do work for my job. (The federal government was closed, so I wasn’t required to do anything, but I had a lot to catch up on.) This morning, I faced the exquisite balance of talking to a co-worker on the phone while trying to entertain a two-year-old, which was a special kind of challenge. (Chris was still shoveling.)
I’ll be working all day tomorrow, albeit telework. I’m bringing the computer to Starbucks though – there’s no way I can spent another day in this house.
Our Christmas this year involved two whole weeks with extended family. With annual leave I had to use by the end of the year, Chris, Sprout and I visited upstate New York from the weekend before Christmas to the one following New Years. My parents and Chris’s parents live within five minutes of each other, making it easy to visit both in a single trip. They also know each other quite well, so they enjoy doing things together. But while we had a wonderful time, not everything went holiday perfect.
High: Having lots of time to participate in holiday activities around the region. From riding on the Polar Express to visiting the train display at a local museum, we got out of the house quite a bit.
Low: The fact that my dad was stuck on the couch most of the trip. Three weeks ago, he stepped forward while playing Pickleball (aka old folks tennis) and felt a pop in his ankle. A visit to the doctor revealed that he had partially tore his ACL, a devastating injury even if you aren’t a professional athlete. To recover, he had to be completely off his feet for two weeks and then have another two months in a stabilizing boot. So he was totally out-of-commission for most of our trip. While my dad is a quiet person, he nonetheless has a calming, light-hearted presence that was sorely missed on our outings. Even when things don’t go as planned, a well-timed, ridiculous comment from him can make me laugh. Plus, I hated that Sprout couldn’t spend that quality time with his grandfather. The one upside was that Sprout was remarkably understanding of the situation. He loved snuggling up on the couch to read books with his Pop and was great about not touching his ankle.
High: Cutting down the Christmas tree. One of Chris’s family’s long-standing traditions is to cut down their own Christmas tree at Bob’s Trees. As we didn’t get a tree for our house this year, I wanted to bring Sprout there to carry on the experience. Because my dad was out of commission, Chris’s parents were kind enough to come with us. We tromped out to the woods, the ground barely coated in snow. My parents had picked out and marked the tree weeks before, so we didn’t need to walk to kingdom-come to find a decent one. After chopping down the tree, we walked back to the car singing Christmas carols, child and adul
t alike garbling most of the lyrics. In the farm’s indoor snack bar, we sipped hot chocolate, gazed at their Christmas tree and checked out their igloo made of recycled plastic bottles. Back outside, we said hello and waved to their two reindeer, who looked bored and sleepy. That night, Sprout declared that seeing the reindeer was his favorite part of the day.
Low: I left some key details out of the above description. While everyone else was cutting down the tree, I had to go to the bathroom. By the time I caught up, they were dragging it to the car. About halfway back, Sprout declared he wanted to carry the tree. He then immediately rejected every branch we offered for him, instead screaming like he was possessed and flailing all of his limbs. Any attempt to connect with or console him was met with further flailage. We finally picked him up, deposited him in his car seat, and restrained him enough to snap him in. Thankfully, changing the scenery and situation gave him enough space to calm down.
High: Decorating the tree. My parents have a wonderful collection of Christmas orn
aments, each of which have personal meaning. Pulling them out and recalling how or why we got them always brings back a slew of memories, from the Baby’s First Christmas ornament from the winter before I was born (my grandmother got it on sale) to a crab ornament from Ocean City this year. Because my mom used to call my dad Pooh Bear, we have a large collection of Winnie the Pooh ornaments that Sprout adored.
Low: Scrambling to ensure Sprout couldn’t touch the delicate ornaments and repeating “Don’t pull ornaments off the tree” a million times.
High: Having Sprout be incredibly well-behaved at the surprisingly long Christmas Eve Mass at Chris’s parents’ church. He actually said “the big church!” was his favorite part of Christmas Eve that night.
Low: It was a long service, topped by a heavy dose of Catholic guilt in the priest’s homily.
High: The joy of Christmas morning. Our family is pretty non-materialistic, but Christmas is the one time of year we buy each other things. Chris loves the “cornucopia” of piles of presents spilling out from under the tree and both sets of grandparents go a little over the top. Sprout was also much more aware of the idea of getting presents this year than last year and reacted with a new enthusiasm. At the same time, he doesn’t have overblown expectations, so he actually appreciated everything and didn’t show disappointment the way older kids sometimes do.
Low: There were so many presents that Sprout actually got a bit bored about opening them by the time we got to my in-laws’ house. Instead, we opened the rest of ours while he played with some of his new toys. I also ended up with a ridiculous number of hand towels as presents. That’s what I get for mentioning that we needed more of them.
High: Playing with all of our presents. The presents we bought Sprout enabled lots of new experiences: we played Sprout’s first game together (the Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game), put on a show with his new puppet theater, and watched him “ride” his new stick horse around the house. The adults even got to enjoy our presents – we listened to the soundtrack to Hamilton, the rap musical about the Founding Fathers, and played games we gave each other, including Love Letter and Tokaido.
Low: Fitting all of the presents in the car was like a version of Tetris inside Tetris where you crammed smaller shapes into bigger ones and then all of the big ones into a giant box that’s a really weird shape. Priuses aren’t meant to carry this much stuff.
High: So much wonderful food. Both my mom and mother-in-law make way too much delicious food for holidays, leaving us with days after days of left-overs. My mother-in-law also decorates with candy; her living room houses several bowls of dark chocolate and M&Ms throughout December.
Low: The fact that I kept eating all of said food way past the point where I should have stopped.
High: Incredible amounts of time with our family. Chris and I are both very close to our families and of course, our parents love spending time with their only grandchild. Sprout also loves spending time with them – he runs to their front doors and greets them with huge hugs. Quality time was at an all-time high, especially with baking. He helped Chris’s mom make apple pie and sugar cookies, rolling out the dough, placing the apples in the pie, and cutting out the cookies. He and my mom made a gingerbread house, which he was particularly keen on after the tenth or twentieth time they read the Gingerbread Man and Jan Brett’s Gingerbread Baby. While he loved rolling out the dough, he was surprisingly uninterested in decorating the house itself. While my mom was encouraging him to stick Frosted Mini-Wheats on the roof as shingles, he was much more interested in eating Reeces Pieces instead. 
Other unintended consquences of said quality time was him learning the Beans, Beans The Musical Fruit song from my mom. Thanks, Mom.
Low: I’m a bit of an introvert at heart, so constantly being around people was kind of exhausting. Shuttling Sprout between the two houses and managing all of the necessary logistics (bedding for naps, cups/utensils for meals, etc.) further exacerbated that issue. I was so preoccupied with fulfilling everyone else’s plans that I completely forgot about a lunch with a former boss that I hadn’t seen in years. In addition, all of the attention made Sprout a little spoiled in the short term. Between mid-day cookie snacks and infinite affection, he reacted much more poorly than usual to the times he needed to do something that he didn’t want to. “Nope!” was his favorite phrase for the last few days of the trip.
High: Dancing together at my in-laws house. As mentioned previously, my mother-in-law has a large collection of singing Christmas decorations. Sprout’s favorite ones this year were a set of Disney characters that play different instruments. He’d say, “Mommy and Daddy (or Grandma and Grandad or Aunt Melissa and Uncle Steve) dance to Mickey,” then drag us over to the table and then press one of the characters. We’d then join hands and trot around in a circle, like a weird version of square dancing. At the end, he’d yell “freeze!” and we’d stand still with jazz hands or something equally absurd. It was the sort of thing you’d only do with a child, but be so glad that you were. His smile was enough to keep me dancing for a long time.
Low: We did end up listening to the Disney characters at least 50 times.
High: Having lunch with a number of our high school friends. Chris and I were high school sweethearts and are still close to a number of our friends from that time. Fortunately, we were able to get a number of them together, including one we haven’t seen in nearly a decade and has almost no online presence! True to character, he announced an absolutely outrageous plan – setting the world record for sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in the smallest sailboat ever. Even our friends with less over-the-top ambitions had much of their lives to share that just aren’t the same discussed over social media. We enjoyed each other’s company so much that we stood outside the restaurant for a half-hour after they closed. It was one of those times you reconnect with people in a way that has instant intimacy. We still trust each other with the deepest parts of our lives, no matter how physically far apart we are.
Low: The only disappointing thing was that we eventually had to leave. Also, we couldn’t bring Sprout along because it was in the middle of his nap. (Considering our friends’ propensity for swearing and Sprout’s mimicry, that probably wasn’t all bad.)
High: Being able to sleep in because I didn’t have to go to work.
Low: There was nothing bad about this at all. I did stay up too late, but that was fun in its own way.
High: We got snow a few days after Christmas! It actually accumulated on the ground and everything. Not a White Christmas, but close.
Low: It was sleeting that morning, making it way too slushy to play in. We also forgot that Sprout’s snow boots from last winter don’t fit anymore and there was no way he could go tromp around in the snow in sneakers.
High: Seeing a weirdly elaborate holiday light display put on by a local business. My father-in-law said it attracts so much attention that there have been a number of accidents from people slowing down too much or pulling onto the shoulder. To avoid that fate, we pulled into their driveway and walked around. Seriously, this thing rivals ZooLights for the sheer amount of lights. This photo is just a fraction of the display.
Low: Man, it was really cold out.
I hope you and your families had a great holiday, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just New Years Day!