I’m so into Christmas this year.

It hasn’t been that way for 3 years, now – since my mom died. I think it’s because she used to like Christmas so damn much. She used to decorate the house until the house cried red and green glitter tears and begged for mercy. We’d go to school one day in December, and when we came home, Santa’s workshop had barfed all over our home. Wait, that’s not fair. It wasn’t tacky. She had a great eye, and the unique ability to go completely overboard, without making it look like crap.

Everything was packed into plain white styrofoam boxes, then packed into bigger cardboard boxes, then hoisted up to the attic – the entrance located in the most awkward spot possible – right above mom’s bathroom sink.

One year, the boxes were hoisted down while I was home from college and not doing much of anything, so I offered to help. She had the system in her head of what went where, and its levels of elaborateness and meticulousness can only be credited to an autisic genius or a raving lunatic, and I think I’ll let which way she leaned be the secret she took to the grave. What this meant for me was a couple of hours of running from where she was standing and CREATING to the giant pile of white boxes stacked on her bedroom floor, in hunt of the plate with the lamb on it, no, that’s the one with the manger on it, which plate-ish shaped box has the proper plate? better open a few more… ah, there it is. Good ol’ lamb plate. Back to mom. Here you go, mom.

It sounds frustrating but really wasn’t – it sort of felt like a roadblock on The Amazing Race. But it did involve a lot of me running back and forth, bringing the wrong thing, and I was tired, and even though I wasn’t frustrated, I was a little worried that my mom was getting frustrated with my non-gifted-in-Christmas-decoration-location ass.

Until at one point, she ran to the bedroom with me to help me search for the right piece, after I’d brought her the wrong one 4 or 5 times. As we searched the big white pile of non-descript boxes, I was so certain she was getting annoyed, when all of a sudden, she looked up at me with this nearly-maniacal-but-probably-just-giddy gleam in her eyes, and declared, “This is so, so fun!”

And at that point, I knew I wasn’t ruining her beloved Christmas decoration tradition – she was just thrilled to get to do it with her oldest kid.

With memories like that, can you see why it’s been difficult for me to get into it? I mean, what’s the point?

I did it half-assed the first couple of years – I always had a roommate, so it was something we could do together. Last year, I was living alone, working Christmas Eve, and didn’t even bother.

But for some reason, this year is different. I’m looking forward to the little trappings that come along with December. I was excited to buy my tree. When I pulled out my trunk of ornaments and started unwrapping them, so many of them trinkets that she made for me, then made sure I received, their look and smell finally did something other than leave me painful and numb.

The magic wasn’t in my head – my neighbor had come to help me, because I’d helped him decorate a couple of weeks ago. He bought a huge fake tree and a few hundred sparkly and new ornaments that day, and that’s what we put up. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun. And I wouldn’t even be comparing the approaches if he hadn’t done it for me – telling me how special it was, how meaningful the entire process was, and how lucky I was to have all those memories, individually wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a trunk, just waiting to be pulled out and revived, year after year.

And he’s right. I am lucky. So instead of my usual strategy of pretending Christmas doesn’t matter, because it smarts too much to remember just how very much it does, I’m going to go into the living room, plug in the lights, sit on the floor, and look at my tree. And I’m going to think about my mom, and how proud she would be that even though it still hurts, I took the time for the sights and the symbols of the season she loved so much.

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