I think one of the things we understand quite late about Christmas is
I think one of the things we understand quite late about Christmas is that, when we were children, we did not really take part in it in the way we understand it now. We were there, of course, and we probably thought we were doing quite a lot. We decorated the tree, stole something from the kitchen before dinner, tried to find out what was inside the packages hidden around the house and kept an eye on every suspicious move the adults made. But the difficult part was done by other people, and it probably never occurred to us to wonder who had done it or how much work had gone into all those things.
It is fairly easy to believe that important things simply happen
When you are a child, it is fairly easy to believe that important things simply happen. Christmas comes, the tree appears, the house smells of food, someone brings oranges, carols are playing and, at some point, there are presents under the tree. You do not see the shopping list, the trips to the store, the money spent, the hours in the kitchen or all the little things that have to be taken care of before a family can finally sit down together. And perhaps it is good that you do not see them. Childhood has that advantage: you are allowed to enjoy the result without worrying about the mechanism behind it.
Later, you start discovering that mechanism. Maybe not all at once, but in pieces. One year you find yourself helping with the shopping, another year you have to choose a present for someone, and eventually you become the person looking for a particular decoration in a box or remembering that something ran out last year and needs to be bought again. They are ordinary things, but through them you begin to see what you did not see before. Christmas was not just something that happened. It was something people made.
I think this is also where that change begins, the one we sometimes feel without knowing exactly when it happened. During adolescence, Christmas may not seem quite as interesting anymore. You have other things to do, other people you want to be with, and maybe some of the traditions seem too old or you feel like you have heard the same carols too many times. It does not necessarily mean that you no longer love Christmas. You are simply no longer the child waiting for it to arrive.
Christmas Snowman Costume a Sarcastic People Funny T-Shirt
Then a few years pass and you start noticing that some things are no longer exactly the way you remember them. Some people leave, others grow older, some homes change, and certain traditions disappear without anyone clearly deciding to stop them. One year something is no longer done, and then you realize that several years have passed since it was last done. Sometimes you remember a particular dish and realize you no longer know exactly how your grandmother used to make it. Or you find an ornament in a box that you saw every year and that now seems rather ordinary, but you still put it on the tree because that is what you have always done.
This is where real nostalgia begins
Not necessarily in wanting to have a certain present again or to see a Christmas tree exactly as it looked back then, but in realizing that those Christmases had people and moments around them that can no longer happen in quite the same way.
When you are a child, you do not really think that a particular Christmas is one of the few you will ever have with certain people. To you, it is simply Christmas that year. You do not know that ten or twenty years later you will remember that particular dinner, that apartment, a certain smell or the way the room with the tree looked. You do not know either that some of the things you considered completely ordinary at the time will later become exactly the things you miss.
Adulthood changes Christmas mostly because it changes us
Funny Christmas Skeleton Santa Sleigh Reindeer Present Reach T-Shirt
Adulthood changes Christmas mostly because it changes us. We begin to have our own memories, our own habits and, gradually, our own responsibilities. We start buying the presents we once waited for someone else to buy, preparing the meal, choosing the tree or wondering whether we have forgotten someone. And at some point we may find ourselves doing exactly the things our parents used to do, without ever noticing when we got here.
It is probably one of the strangest transitions in life. At first, you receive Christmas from other people, and eventually you start creating it for other people.
And only then do you begin to understand why certain things were done every year, even when it probably would have been easier not to do them anymore. Not because they necessarily had to be done, but because some traditions keep time in a kind of order. You put the same ornaments on the tree, look for the same music, make the same food and, for a few days, you have the feeling that the passing year has not changed absolutely everything.
That is also one of the reasons Christmas becomes more important as we grow older. Not because it becomes more spectacular, but because we have more things to compare it with. We have more Christmases in our memory and we begin to see them next to one another. The one from childhood, the one from adolescence, the first Christmas after leaving home, the one when you had your own home for the first time, the one when someone was missing for the first time.
In the end, Christmas changes less than we think. Places change, people change and the way we prepare for it changes, but there remains that attempt to step away from the ordinary rhythm for a little while and bring together, during the same period, a few things we do not want to lose. For a child, these are the things they are discovering. For an adult, they are often the things they are trying to preserve.
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