Christmas is coming, and we finally pulled out the decorations and did something with that Fuck Flake that arrived a few days ago.
Mom died back in 2012, the year before we moved here. She died just over a month before Christmas. In 2012 the only reason that we had a tree up was that Kirk put it up and decorated. I just sat on the couch and cried.
The next year I got rid of a lot of decorations. Partly because we moved on Halloween and we had decided that we would never again rent storage space. If it didn’t fit into the new place, it had to be weighed against other things for need, relevance, and how much happiness it brought.
I suppose that’s why it was easy to dump a lot of Christmas related items. Christmas didn’t bring joy.
Dad died a couple of years later, also late in the year, and December brought a gathering to celebrate his life, but also to mourn his passing.
And so Christmas didn’t win any new joy from me.
Christmas hurts my heart and, in some ways, it sends me into a bit of depression every year. It’s a hard time of year for me. I struggle to do cards, I struggle to wrap gifts. I struggle to bake. I see everything that needs to be done, and I can’t get myself to do it, and then I feel depressed because I can’t get going, and that gets me spiralling down further. It’s a vicious cycle.
So it’s interesting that today, when we hauled it out from the crawlspace under the stairs, that I realized how little we have now.
Sure, we have enough for two trees because I took Mom’s Christmas tree and all her Christmas tree bears and other tree decorations, so most if not all of our tree decorations never come out of the box.
Mom had stayed with us for Christmas 2011, the year before she died, and she and I had gone Boxing Day sale shopping.l I’d bought some beautiful glass tree decorations.
They’ve yet to ever grace a tree.
But after decorating the tree and dispersing a few things around the house I did realize how little we have left, and that combining that fact with the fact that this place is larger than the old condo….it feels underwhelming and slightly sparse.
On the upside, the fact that it feels that way does seem to imply that I am finally coming out of that deep hole and am willing, in fact wanting, to have a little more Christmas sprinkled around the place.
Maybe COVID has something to do with it, or maybe not.
Regardless, 2020 will be forever remembered with that fuck flake that now graces the centre of Mom’s Christmas bear tree.
I think Mom would have appreciated it.
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