Why I love Christmas

Last night I festooned the house with our advent chains and hung up the chocolate advent calendars. And, yes, for the entire month of November I entertained visions of creating heirloom quality advent calendars from upcycled, felted wool sweaters and old socks. But instead I hung up two $1.69 Zellers specials, the ones covered in pictures of Marvel Superheroes and filled with fingernail sized, waxy chocolate squares.

First thing this morning, Aidan and Leo each ate their chocolate (before breakfast, what kind of mother am I?)and opened their chains. We made the paper chains I remember from my childhood. There are 24 links and each link contains a secret message, something Christmasy that has to be done that day. It's like your secret agent Christmas orders for the day. Today's task was to decorate the house. So, after school,I dragged out the Christmas decorations from the basement: the wind up Santa statue that plays Silent Night that Kurtis' mom gave us a few years ago, the china penguins that huddle around the warmth of a candle flame, holding out their flippers like movie set homeless men, warming up by a garbage can fire, the Christmas kissing ball and the drunken salt dough snowmen that Aidan and I made when he was five, who always look like they may not make it home from the bar.

Leo was so excited by it all. He loved finding places to hang wreaths. He loved positioning the penguins and playing with the knitted Santa elephants. He must have wound the Santa statue forty five times, the tinny notes of Silent Night are still ringing in my ears. He did get a little carried away with the drunken snowmen and one of them suffered a slight mishap, losing the tip of his carrot nose. I'm telling myself that it adds to their charm.

And that's what I love about Christmas. Somehow, the haphazard, slightly hacky aspect of our lives gains a magical quality. It sounds hokey, I know, but in December all the things I might normally blush about or try to nudge under the rug with my toe; the flour on the counter tops, the bits of glitter glue and paint smeared across my kitchen floor, the piles of scrap paper and trash bag wreaths, all of those things are suddenly elevated to the realm of the touching and thoughtful. The slapdash suddenly becomes homey and sweet. The tackiness turns into enthusiasm. It all gets so much more meaning at Christmas.

We got our tree tonight. It's lying down, wrapped in a garbage bag, on our porch along with an explosion of paper snowflakes that we stuck up with masking tape last year and never managed to take down. I wonder if our neighbours appreciate my definition of Christmas as much as I do. I do know that the kids still get the magic, even the tacky magic. I caught Leo staring at his Spiderman advent calendar before he went up to bed tonight. He kissed it and whispered "I love you".