Liz Willman
Years ago, when my kids were in early elementary school, I had this “creative” idea to make the Christmas Season last longer in our house by celebrating the 12 days of Christmas.
Rather than have an avalanche of presents on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I announced to my two young children, that we were going to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas – from Christmas to Epiphany on January 6th. We always had left our Christmas tree up until Epiphany anyway so I thought this would be easy. I also thought our Jewish friends have success with the practice of opening one gift per day during their season of Hanukah. Surely, my children would enjoy a similar tradition of spreading out the gifts longer.
On Christmas Eve we had them open their presents from far away grandparents so they could call and thank them as per our tradition. On Christmas morning they awoke to filled stockings and a gift from Santa. That evening, I pulled out 12 small gifts for each and placed them under the tree.
It did not go well. They immediately wanted to know “Why” they could not open the additional gifts that day. Looking back – maybe I could have explained my rationale better. Maybe I should have started when they were younger. Rather than obsess over what I could have done better, I decided to use the experience to look forward.
They are both young adults living in other cities now. This Christmas season, I plan to write each of them a short note on a trait of theirs that I admire and mail one per day for the 12 days of Christmas. Besides this being a nice “throw back” to when people wrote actual letters to each other, it might have an impact on their current, hectic lives to recall Christ in their lives each day.
Both my kids are engaged to be married in the coming year. I imagine there will be grandchildren down the road. I think my special place in their lives could be “the funny grandma who at Christmas, gives us a little gift each day for 12 days”. That might not be so bad.