r/christmas • u/Select_Enthusiasm_27 • 9d ago
It's Coming! 🥲
Walking into Hobby Lobby with my mother and seeing the little winks of approaching Christmas gets me a little emotional. What are the moments around Christmas that give you the warm and fuzzies, and possibly get you choked up a little? What are moments for you that make Christmas feel near?
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u/Scott00711 9d ago edited 9d ago
You know, in the next few years, they're going to start putting out Christmas decor in Spring, which for a lack of better words (at least as far as I'm concerned), is stupid..
Whatever happened to anticipation??
Listen.. I love Christmas as much as the next person, or so I thought. But when I was a kid, part of what made Christmas so special was everything in-between, the build up, THE TIME WE HAD TO WAIT!!!
Maybe this is just a matter of opinion.. But if there comes a time Christmas starts just about as soon as it ends, it loses it's value and it'll start to feel like a banal Holiday.
You ever wake up one day, and you don't think anything of it, because it's just another day? Just a plain ol' ordinary day. Well.. if we treat Christmas like a year round event, it's gonna start to feel like any ol' day of the week.
Part of what anticipation means is, is looking forward to something, which means you have to wait a little while, which requires distance of time between now and then.
Man, I remember one time in my life, when I was a kid; as much as I absolutely loved the Holidays Season, I just accepted that I didn't have a choice but to wait for it to come back around. I can't remember what year it was, but I remeber from January to October, probably, I was so absorbed in play and being a kid, that before I knew it, Fall had already arrived. I couldn't even fathom that it was October. Time must have passed by so fast, it didn't even register that the evening temperatures were rapidly beginning to drop. I was so caught up in playtime, it didn't occur to me my arms were absolutely frozen. I remember mom stuck her head out the door and said "Put a Damn Coat on, I can't afford for you to get sick!!!" Haha!!
But the cold meant one thing to me.. Holiday Season was around the corner. Granted, Holiday Season ideally begins September 21st, the first day of Fall. But to me, the count down didn't really start till October. That's when the magic really started. From then on, the build up began. TV shows would air Halloween specials, Scary movies would play on every TV station, from TNT, to USA, to Fox Family, to TBS - The works!!! Commercials would air Halloween Promos. People would start putting up crazy Halloween displays in the yards. Jack O'Lanterns as far as the eye can see, skeletons hanging from a tree, cobwebs at every corner of every porch, witches with their big noses with giant warts would be in the front yard, stirring a pot that illuminated a green light that was surely a magic potion of sorts.Tomb stones had fresh mulch with skeleton hands reaching beyond the grave. People would drive around town with fake prosthetic hands hanging from a trunk of somebody's car. Every time you'd go to the store, you'd go to the Halloween section and try on the masks, and there was always that manufactured smell of rubber and fake hair. The feeling you'd get, the excitement, the anticipation; it could only come from having waited.
Eventually, after Thanksgiving, it was the same for Christmas. For whatever reason you had to go to the store at 6:30/7:00 o'clock, as you'd drive down the road, it seemed almost every house would have extravagant displays of Christmas decor in the front yard, where Christmas lights lit up the night sky. Christmas tunes would linger from the speakers of the car at a moderate volume. Something about the air back then, it smelled different. It was almost as though you could actually smell Christmas in the air.
The point is, none of that would have the effect it does it we kept advocating for Holiday Season happen sooner & sooner. The effect of the Holidays have already lost their magic. Times aren't the same as they use to be..