Lowering expectations to find the magic of Christmas

I think that my expectations of Christmas have always been too high as an adult. Every year, I have built up to Christmas, but then it has been a bit of an anti climax.  This happens no matter how much I have prepared and worked hard at making it perfect.  I am probably searching for the magic that I felt as a child, Our Christmases are a lot less commercial than most people’s as we don’t buy a lot of presents, or fill up trolleys at the supermarket.  I buy wrapping paper, cards, mincemeat and Christmas puddings in January for the following Christmas, and buy presents throughout the year,  A lot of my presents are also homemade eg hampers, booze, or baking.

Still, I get caught up in the hype and look forward to it every year.  The Christmas movies with happy endings, perfect families in TV adverts, Christmas songs of times gone by (which I remember with rose coloured glasses), perfect winter scenes on Christmas cards, twinkling fairy lights, and baking enough to induce gluttony, are par for the course.  Over the year we forget the stress from trying to get all the dinner warm at the same time to serve, Christmas shopping in crowded shops, family get togethers with waring siblings, Uncle Tony’s drunk jokes, or getting another chocolate orange when you don’t really like them.

This year I am going to chill, and not try as hard.  Less is more, sometimes.  One of our nicest Christmas meals I ever made was when the oven broke and we had to cook part of the turkey on the Foreman grill.  Expectations were low and so the dinner tasted lovely, and was enjoyed by all.  The best presents I have received have been when I didn’t expect anything.  This year we are doing a secret Santa and so I will know exactly what I will be getting as we all wrote a wish list. No opening the paper and thinking that is another one for the charity shop, or to be regifted!  We no longer have a TV and so I will not be disappointed with what is on this year, either.

I want to find that magical feeling of Christmas again. Hopefully it will be hiding within my family and just spending time  together, relaxing, and enjoying precious interactions that we no longer take for granted now as we live so far apart  The magic will be brought through my grandson’s eyes.  He finds joy in everything, It is the first time that he will know what Christmas is really about and so I want him to experience the wonder, but not the greed.  I want our Christmas to be simple, with no expectations.

Christmas felt special when I was little.  We spent hours making paper chains and decorations for the tree. We rarely got sweets or treats and so they were something to really look forward to.  Now they are often an every day expectation.  I always got a box with chocolate pipes and spanners in (and they wondered why I was a tomboy). We would go carol singing to raise money to buy our carefully picked presents for our parents, and have competitions to see who could spot the most lit Christmas trees on the journey to the family dinner. Our presents would fit into an empty pillow case and were often things that we needed.  We still felt grateful as the only other time we got new clothes was at Whitsuntide.  Now clothes are disposable if a button has fallen off.  I would always get a lovely book off my Aunty Sue, and a main present that I had wished for. I felt so happy.

We spent time as a family at Christmas, and my Aunty Ivy would make me a snowball from advocaat.  It would have a coloured glass fork in it with a cherry attached.  I felt so grown up. I loved looking at the glittering glass balls on the Christmas tree (that looked like a loo brush) at my Gran’s house.  My dream was to have one like the bird with a tail fanned out like a pastry brush. I inherited it from my Mum and it will go on my tree this year. There was never enough food for second helpings in those days as everything was expensive, You therefore never felt ill and over full as we always seem to feel after dinner now.  There wasn’t the choice of food that there is now adays, but the Christmas meal all felt very special as meat was a treat, and we ate egg and chips, or a casserole with a couple of bits of chewy meat in normally.  My gran would fill the table with preserves at tea time, but I didn’t like them in those days.  I never thought that one day I would make them too..

I ask myself if it possible to have those magical Christmases again when we all have so much compared to those times.   Will my family be disappointed as they are used to the consumerism? There was a kind of feeling of ‘good will’ back then that seems to have disappeared from modern living.  We would wish Merry Christmas to strangers, and people somehow seemed kinder at this time of year.  I don’t think that it was just due to religion, either.   Thinking back, it wasn’t too long after the war, and rationing was still in people’s minds.  I guess the adults were just glad to be alive and be living in better times.  I feel grateful that I have experienced those days, and hopeful that I can capture them again.  Fingers crossed that by reducing my expectations, taking the pressure off myself, and increasing my appreciation of having this time with family, we can capture that Christmas  magic again,.  Have you managed to capture that Christmas magic as an adult?