I just can’t seem to get into the holiday spirit this year.

We didn’t celebrate St. Nick’s this year. We don’t have any of our decorations up yet. Hell, we haven’t even brought them up from the basement. We got some lovely Christmas ornaments as wedding presents, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to clean up the house enough to warrant bringing up all the Christmas stuff from the basement. I haven’t begun to write out our Christmas cards. I barely have touched my shopping.

Maybe it’s S.A.D. Maybe I just hate December. I dunno. I do know I hate feeling like this though.

I adore Christmas. I have such great memories of Christmas. I loved when the whole family would bundle up, pile into the van, and huddle under my Gran’s crocheted afghans as we drove around looking at Christmas lights, singing Christmas songs…completely off-key. I loved watching my Gran’s very specific methodology of cookie and candy making (and damned if I don’t miss her Coconut Bon-Bon’s…even the ones with the funky pastel colors that we made such fun of every year.) I loved how she would dim the lights in the living room, turn on the Christmas music and Christmas tree and we would sit and watch the tree for hours. I loved how she insisted on having the Creche put up first, even before the tree. She knew what was important, by damn. I absolutely coveted the “kid’s tree” in the basement family room. It was a puny tree, covered with every horrible ornament all of us kids had ever made in school, Brownies, Boy Scouts, or CCD. The tree was ringed by ropes of garland made from plastic candies, which I thought were just the coolest things in the whole world.

Things are different now. My family doesn’t do any of those things anymore. My gran passed away nearly 7 years ago. The van was sold long before that. There are few Bon-Bons and none made in Easter blue and pink at Christmas. There is a different tree in the living room and the crèche, if it is put up at all, is put up last. There is no tree in the basement.

Stephen and I are trying to start our own traditions. We began our shopping today, sipping hot chocolate spiked with peppermint as we walked along Main Street, window shopping. We drove around tonight, sans Christmas music because I have a very bad habit of putting CD’s in the wrong jewel cases (there was no Joan Baez’s Noel, there was only Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. He was not thrilled. Heh). But we saw some lovely light displays and some that would put the Griswolds to shame. We have agreed to do a cleaning blitz tomorrow after I return from Mass so that we can begin decorating before we leave to see Harry Connick Junior in concert tomorrow night.

I’m really pinning my hopes on Harry tomorrow night to put me in the spirit.