A Bubble Off Plumb

We’re busy. We’re all busy and it is a crazy-busy time of year. I get it. There are guests coming and going, parties to attend, school functions and still the household must be maintained. You can’t really go to a party without clean clothes.

My own weekend passed in a blur, full of running after two grandsons, live wires with all the vim and vigor of the Energizer bunny on sugar overload. The poor little pikers, I squeezed in picking them up from their mom between helping set up a Ferguson House booth at City Hall and running to photograph the tree lighting ceremony at Centennial Park.

They took it all in stride as kids will, and really seemed to enjoy tagging along while Grandma took pictures of other kids doing fun things as they sipped hot cocoa. One even snuggled up to the Grinch because, as he said, “The Grinch looks lonely.”

They went home Sunday night and it is hard to believe how quiet the house is without them. It was a melancholy feeling, but not the holiday blues. What tugs my heartstrings is how this is happening all over, in our town, our state, around the country. The holidays make us too busy to enjoy the holidays.

What are the things our kids – or grandkids – will remember the most? Traffic jams and hurrying to photo sessions and parties and shopping? Presents? Being dragged from pillar to post to eat a meal with this part of the family only to get in the car and go eat with another part?

Probably not. Judging by my own experience, it is the time spent with the closest family, with brothers and sisters, parents. It has to do with meals made with more love than any other ingredient. It is the teachable moments spent in the kitchen measuring sugar for cookies. The kids won’t even remember having to wait while mom washes the measuring spoons because they have already been used at least once that day.

It is the stories that go with the ornaments as they are hung on the tree. Talking about the days when Father Christmas brought the tree in the sleigh on Christmas Eve and when an orange was great grandma’s holiday treat during the Depression. Laughing as they remember the time little brother broke one of the shepherds from the Nativity set and used super glue to repair it, except it was an antique paper figure that burst into smoldering ash moments later.

It isn’t from the box that the kids get that they crave, need, remember. It is the little pieces of ourselves that we give them and our friends that make the season bright, and mimic the greatest gift ever given, a piece of God himself that came to earth that Christmas long ago.