I decided to take it very easy this Christmas. Somehow, I always get overwhelmed. So this year, I am allowing some of the more time-consuming traditions to fall by the wayside. For instance, we always used to drive up to Freeport, Maine, to do some Christmas shopping. Well, I’d love to, but I don’t think a four-hour car trip would be much fun for Nathaniel. We’ll pick that up again someday, when he’s older.

Then there are the ornaments. Sarah was a collector, God bless her, so there are approximately four times as many ornaments as we could possibly fit on an eight-foot tree. We do have a cathedral ceiling in the living room, though, so maybe someday we’ll find a fifteen-foot tree that isn’t too wide at the base, and put up all the ornaments. Sarah always used to talk about getting multiple trees, and having themes for them: this one would be fish, shellfish, and other undersea creatures; this one would be nautical; this one would be Peanuts (she loved Snoopy); and then the main tree for all the rest (travel souvenirs, hippos, manatees, etc.).

In the past, for some reason, we would have to unpack all the ornaments in a blizzard of tissue paper, and lay them out on every available flat surface, and only then could we hang them on the tree. This was more than a bit stressful to me; I’ve never been diagnosed with obsessive/compulsive disorder, but there’s definitely a part of me that wanted to whimper and hide when Sarah would get going with the ornaments. I also never understood why it all had to happen in one night.

This year, I took it at my own pace. I left all the glass ornaments in their acid-free storage boxes, because I didn’t want Nate to feel left out. Perhaps tonight after he goes to bed I will hang a few of them; the tree is half naked, but the important thing is that we took it slow and easy and everyone had fun. We’d unpack one, decide whether to hang it and where, and then move on to the next one. I gave him metal ornaments, wooden ornaments, and plastic ornaments, and he hung them all on the same branch, whereupon the branch buckled and dropped them all on the floor. And several ornaments went directly into the trash. I never liked this one; even Sarah never liked these, but they held some precious memory or other for her, now lost forever; and here is an entire bucket of oh my God those are ugly.

This should streamline the process even more for next year. The house can only hold so much clutter, and I am getting to the point where if something doesn’t bring me or Nathaniel joy, then I don’t see any reason to keep it around. We go to Goodwill every week on our way to the grocery store, and Nate has been very helpful in identifying baby toys that he doesn’t love any more.

On Tuesday, I took the day off from work to bake Christmas cookies. This was always Sarah’s department, and I skipped the tradition last year, just because we ran out of time. But this year, I bravely got out the mixing bowl and set Nate up on a stool by the kitchen counter. We mixed and mashed, and eventually got to the point where I realized that someone was going to have to roll the dough into balls. Uh, wait a minute now. You want me to touch it, like with my fingers? The answer was clear: ain’t nobody else gonna do it. Even Nate was horrified at the idea. But I am father and mother to him, I realized, and Sarah would have done it without a second thought. So I dived in, and you know, it wasn’t so bad. She would have been proud. At least until the point where I burned 24 of the 36 cookies into little peanut butter cinders.

We’ll try again today. Top rack only, this time.