Confession time: I’m not obsessed with Christmas. While, admittedly, I do meet many typical white girl stereotypes (I love yoga pants, smartwater, baking, posting pictures of my dog on Instagram, etc.), a deep love of surrounding myself with all things Christmas doesn’t make the list for me.
Don’t get me wrong: I love CHRISTMAS. I love being with my family this time of year. I love that it means excuses to have parties and go to parties and bake delicious treats. I love Christmas Vacation and Elf viewings. I love the coziness of the season.
What I DON’T love about Christmas? Putting up decorations. Decorations themselves? All for it. Other people’s decorations at their houses? Sure! Love it! Keep ’em coming! When it comes to my house, though, there are so many things that make the list ahead of decorating for Christmas.
That’s why this is the extent of our Christmas decorations this year:
A rather non-committal holiday-ish wreath and a lumberjack nutcracker*.
I’m such a Scrooge, I know.
One day, we will decorate. (We have in the past, even.) But this year, we opted out. After all, we’re lucky enough to be spending several days with our families the week leading up to Christmas, so there’s such a limited amount of time we’d be home to enjoy decorations in the first place.
This year, there’s so much else going on that decorating took a backseat. Instead, we spent time with friends. We relaxed. We worked. We worked out. And we didn’t want to sacrifice any of those things in exchange for making our house look Christmas-y. (This realization gives me so much admiration for my parents, who always made Christmas at our house beautifully festive, despite all the other things they had going on. Thank you for the time you spent making the holiday so special for us, Mom and Dad!)
And guess what? It still feels like Christmas even minus the tree and lights and reindeer. Christmas is everywhere we go. And it’s going to be a good one this year.
(I must say, though — it’s harder to find a place to store yet-to-be-delivered Christmas gifts when you don’t have a tree to put them under. Bah, humbug.)
*(Come on, though — that nutcracker is pretty amazing, right? A Target find! Just $10!)
