The Magic of Elfing and Framily
Establishing holiday traditions, concocting joy from thin air, and redefining family.
Every year we pull out the Christmas decorations, some of them almost two decades old at this point, stored in an array of cardboard boxes and plastic totes in our attic.
I want to keep them for my children so they have those decorative items from their earliest memories, but many of them trigger far different emotions for me.
Sometimes by the time the tree is decorated and the garland arranged, I find myself a bit sad. Or retroactively angry. Rediscovering a beloved decoration I had to glue back together after someone smashed it in anger, or pulling out the ornament etched with the names of former friends who hurt us deeply.
Should I toss it? I place it back in the box every year.
Perhaps I keep them as a lesson; a reminder. When I see that item, or those names, the hurt rises back to the surface and I recall exactly what hard lesson I learned in those painful days.
All memories aren’t meant to be great ones.
Nostalgia, fantasy, and reality
Christmas has been spun a thousand different ways by a thousand different entities, using the season for…
