The other day we were getting things ready for Thanksgiving, playing Christmas music at Ella's request when she piped up in her little voice,"I love this time of year."
I love it too, but this year I find myself getting way too nostalgic for holidays past. Jack no longer believes in Santa and Ella is beginning to waver. They both think the Elf on the Shelf is a joke. This is the first year the elf has not made an appearance right after Thanksgiving and I wonder whether I should even bother. Jack said it best: "Mom, the Elf just pretty much ruins the whole Santa thing. I mean, anyone can see that it's made out of plastic. It's so fake." Yet just a few short years ago he would leap out of bed in the morning and race around the house looking for it, eager to see where the elf had landed during the previous evening.
Thanksgiving has changed too in the last few years. Last week after finally getting all the little nephews to bed we FINALLY got to have an adult evening with vodka tonics and a rousing game of hearts. We'd spend our usually chaotic Thanksgiving at my mom's house and it was now the following evening. In years past we had regular game nights during these holiday sleepovers at my parents' house in Bethesda. Those nights have been few and far between due to my sister's never-ending state of having babies for the past five years. Usually by the time the last child is tucked in and finally bribed into dream land we are all too tired to stay up and play a game.
Not this time. By 10 p.m. the drinks had been poured, the cards had been shuffled and John's umpteenth turkey and mayo sandwich had been consumed. This year we invited Jack to join in (he had a club soda) and I began to realize how much had really changed in the past few years. It seemed like the last time we'd played cards like this, my dad had still been at the table, squinting through his reading glasses at his cards and inevitably throwing the wrong card down while cackling to himself like a deranged witch. Jack and Ella had been the little ones who needed coaxing to go to bed and my sister and her husband had been the childless ones, knocking back beers and staying up til 2 a.m.
This time I think we made it until midnight. John won (of course) and we officially turned Jack into a hearts pro. New jokes were born that night, including a recurring Lady Gaga reference after I described to Jack what a poker face was in a charade-like manner. At the end of several hands one or two of us inexplicably ended up holding the wrong number of cards which resulted in endless shrieks of laughter and accusations of not paying attention. It was a lot of fun. I miss those kinds of nights.
I remember when my parents first bought that house. It was 1999 and John and I had been married for a year. My mom was thrilled that they were finally going to live in a real neighborhood near the city, not some outlying suburb where the next door neighbors had six foot fences and drove into their garages every evening, never to be seen. I drove past the house one day to check it out shortly after they had put the contract on it. As I sat in my car and gazed at the 1920s cape cod, a warm fuzzy feeling came over me. I could picture our family in this white house with its picturesque green shutters and dormer windows, celebrating the Christmases of the future as soft snowflakes fluttered down from the sky. I remember thinking to myself, "This is the house my kids will always remember as their grandparents' house. This is where we'll make their Christmas memories." I felt like I had come home.
And here we are now. We haven't spent every Christmas there - there were two Christmases where my sister had just had her babies and we traveled to her house in Philly instead. But this is where our Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter memories will live in our children's hearts - no matter where they spend holidays later in life.
I think I'll dig up that elf and put him somewhere tonight. Maybe I'll set him up doing something silly, just for the fun of it. Even if my kids don't think he's real, at least they'll have a nice memory of their mom making them laugh. Some day when they have kids of their own, maybe they'll tell them about their elf and about holidays in the white house in Bethesda.
Maybe Jack will even tell them about the first time he got to stay up late with the adults and play hearts.
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