While they unpack every play food piece in the sunroom nearby, I’m packing up Christmas. It’s usually a little bittersweet taking down the mistletoe, wrapping up fragile ornaments, and forcefully removing the same tree we so gingerly welcomed into our home a few weeks ago. The fresh, newness of a relatively decluttered home as we start the new year paired with the nostalgia of a Christmas that came and went too fast. Every year, it’s the same.
But, last year was different. Our single-family home was a two-families-live-here home. And, it was fun and chaotic and hard and refining.
And, now this year was different. This was the Christmas of NJ, the little boy who stumbled into our home at 2:30am one Saturday night and kept on stumbling for the rest of the month. This was the December of getting up at 5:00am for a scrambled eggs and coffee date at our kitchen table (sans coffee for the boy). This was the Christmas of celebrating small victories (like watching angry little kicking feet instead of other hurtful ways to show anger) and the smallest hints of progress (like hearing a sound uttered that sounded just like “hi” and witnessing it being used to say just that). This was the Christmas of learning more deeply about brokenness and our need for relationship and why Christmas was needed in the first place. This was the Christmas of introducing a little boy to the Baba and Mama and brothers and sisters who are going to love him with a love much grander than the love he received from us.
It has been quite the Christmas.
And, now, it’s time to close it all up, to put away all the fancy little things that make us giddy after Thanksgiving. I had to smile wrapping up the stocking holders I insisted on buying years and years ago when we had only one baby. Mark shook his head at me when I bought 7 holders during an after-Christmas sale. As our family grew one child at a time, one more stocking holder would come out of the packaging. There was just one left that had never been unwrapped. But, last year, it held up Caleb’s stocking; this year, NJ’s. No one shook their head at me when I wondered out loud who might use it next.
Packing up NJ’s bag is next.
{sigh}
