The Christmas season is ramping up at our house, albeit a lot more slowly this year. Having a one-year old in the house means we have to be much more thoughtful about decorations, for one thing, and for another we can’t find our old Christmas tree anywhere. I vaguely recall my husband deciding to toss our artificial tree last year, but he has no memory of it. Either way it meant buying another one. (While we prefer a live tree, the cats would destroy it.) This past weekend the 7 year old and one of her friends dragged some things up from the basement, and in one of the crates was a green glass bowl that I swear I have not seen in 30 years. It was my mother’s, and she used it for chips every Christmas Eve when I was a kid/teenager/young adult. I was instantly transported back to our old living room, eating chips out of that bowl while my grandfather delivered presents and my uncles were deep in the booze. I half want to use the bowl, and half want it to go back into the basement because anything glass in our house is just doomed. Also, we have Christmas pictures scheduled to be done this weekend which has sent me scrambling trying to find the kids’ matching Christmas PJ’s that I bought last year, which means that I have ransacked every closet in every room, and random boxes in the basement, and I have found all sorts of clothes that mostly need to be donated. This is a long way of saying that laundry has taken over the living room – although I am happy to report the last missing PJ pants were found yesterday, so I can now move on to other things.

One of the worst parenting decisions I ever made was embracing the Elf on the Shelf. Ours is a girl named Collette, named after my brother-in-law’s girlfriend. (We don’t know why the 7 year old chose to do this, except that while on vacation Collette let the 7 year old ransack her luggage and a grand old time was had.) As much as I would like to just forget about it, the girls love it and honestly, this may be the last year that both of them believe. However, because we’ve had some real behavioral challenges with the girls over the past few weeks, I have been putting off this year’s arrival of our Elf on the Shelf. I finally caved last night, putting our elf on our fireplace mantle with a note that basically said, “great job at school now stop acting like maniacs at home”. Our elf brings surprises – usually little treats or toys, but occasionally bigger things – and despite my pre-parenthood insistence that I would never stoop to bribe a child of mine, both girls are easily incentivized. This morning there was virtually no fighting and we actually got out of the door on time, hallelujah and hurray. No one threw a fit, either — last year the elf’s first offering was matching pajamas and the then-6 year old was furious because “pajamas aren’t a surprise!”. This year the elf took a big risk on some Christmas-themed shirts, fully expecting that they would be thrown in a fit of rage, but both girls happily wore them to school. Parenthood is half effort, half luck.

Anyway. The behavioral challenges…the girls are perfectly well-behaved at school and excellent students and friends. My grandmother (Geraldine) always said that kids “let their hair down at home” and, wow. That has absolutely proved to be the case at our house. Their teachers act shocked when I regale them with our tales of woe and tell me that it must be because they feel safe at home. (Talk about no good deed going unpunished…) In reality a lot of it has to do with two former only children learning how to share parents and have a sibling that is very close in age. When it’s good, its great — they play well together and enjoy each other’s company, until it suddenly turns on a dime and everything erupts into shouting and tears. But these tantrums are interspersed with some incredibly sweet moments. Recently the 7 year old had to get some shots, and immediately after leaving the doctor’s office she insisted on calling home to talk to the 6 year old. “I had to get shots and it hurt!”, and the 6-year old said in a very worried voice, “Oh no! Are you okay?” And then the conversation immediately devolved into laughing over poop jokes. At any rate, everyone I talk to with multiple kids just laughs and says, yeah sounds normal to me, but ooof. To paraphrase Ted Lasso, their fighting is like Woody Allen playing the clarinet and I don’t want to hear it. At all.

Watching: Man on the Inside on Netflix is REALLY good, even though the fact that I loved it probably confirms that I am middle-aged, heading into even older territory. Also? I’ve hate-watched a couple of Christmas movies on Netflix and there seems to be an endless supply of them. When did Christmas become about romance? How did we get from the pagan tradition of yule to the birth of Jesus to career-woman-gets-stuck-in-a-snowy-town-and-trips-over-some-impossibly-handsome-nice-guy? And why are the plots virtually the same in all of them? I mean, I was single for years and often went home to my snowy rural town for the holidays, and the only men I ever ran into were twice-my -age alcoholics with several ex-wives in their rear-view mirror, chasing them down for child support. (To be fair, these movies do not appear to be taking place in rural Maine.)

Listening: On Spotify there is an Alternative Christmas music station that is mellow enough to play while trying to get the baby to sleep but holiday-enough to fit my mood.

Doing (other than laundry): help me, because I got it into my head to knit each of the kids something for Christmas. I have 22 days to finish a blanket I started for the baby six months ago, and then knit the girls a cat and a rabbit along with clothes for said cat and rabbit. I also have a whole pile of unfinished sewing projects, including the Halloween quilts for the kids I never finished.

Not Doing: taking my thyroid meds (I keep forgetting), wallpapering the baby’s room, hanging up artwork, cleaning out my car, about a million other things.

Finally, I leave you with this: in my social media scrolling I stumbled across this poem by David Gate called Joy Is An Act of Rebellion – you can find his site here. As someone who grew up on the Star Wars movies I love a good rebellion, and I love the notion of true joy being something that cannot be commodified means it flies in the face of everything our society seems to value. The joy of singing and rocking my babies to sleep, the joy of seeing excited little faces waking me up to tell me the elf came back, the joy of making things with my hands, and the joy of a cat purring next to me – impossible to put a price on, impossible to sell, and free to give and share.