Finding the Christmas Magic

I keep wondering why I do not feel the Christmas vibes this year. I wonder if it is the environment in which I am right now or if it is because I am getting older and these things aren't as good as they used to be for me as a kid.

As a kid, I often looked forward to this time of the year. It is usually the time when we have family members come around to visit, most especially because of my mother, whose birthday coincides with Christmas, and we have a merry time together.

Ever since 2011, we usually had something like a party around Christmas day, usually a day or two before. My mother turned forty in 2011, and it was a massive one. The next massive one was when she turned fifty in 2021. In between the years in that decade, we had relatively small parties to celebrate her.

I am not used to having a Christmas tree in the centre of our home with gift boxes under it or having the entire house totally decorated with fancy Christmas decorations. Sometimes we would have little decorations, like placing Christmas lights all around the house, but that's usually just about it most of the time.

Santa is not real, of course. I do not think that some guy from the North Pole actually travels all around the world flying on a sleigh with magical reindeers, visiting the houses of people who haven't been on the naughty list all year. And then he'd grant some Christmas wishes around. All that was a delightful thing to believe in as a kid, but I am much older now, and I barely think about or remember it, except in certain Christmas songs.

I am not trying to be a Grinch. This year and the last have been years when I have felt very apathetic to many things. Many things do not excite me any more, and I have lost the enthusiasm that I once had for things that I would fascinate or be zealous about. It all started in the year 2022. I am not sure how or why, but I felt it over the months.

I contemplated travelling home or staying back here for the holidays a couple of days ago. I am yet to leave for home, as I finally decided to travel, but as Christmas day draws near, I can't help but feel the fact that I may have lost my Christmas spirit. I mostly feel like being on my own, with my family, of course, and then enjoying whatever I find interesting or exciting during this period.

Pressure, stress, worries, failed relationships, and inconveniences, among other things, may be what's causing this feeling. I have been feeling a lot more like this—lack of interest in many things I used to care much about—but I am yet to understand it much myself.

So for hours and hours as I pondered on this new community prompt about a wish for Christmas, I really couldn't think of one. Of course, I do have certain things I could wish for, but they didn't exactly feel deep or right for such a thing. There is one thing, however.

You see, I have been single-parented by my mother for all of my life. It's been just her all the way. In many ways, she's been everything, particularly a father and mother all in one. It would be a little bit of a challenge to sum up everything that she is into words, so I put them in different places at different points in time sometimes.

One of the few times that I have shared about my mother is in Everyday for You: The Imperfectly Perfect Mother. It was Mother's Day for the 100th time this year—because I usually lose count of the number of times we celebrate women in a year—and so I thought to whip up something specially written for her and that she would love. She loved it, so much so that I had a couple of her friends reach out to me concerning how thoughtful and lovely it was. Apparently, she couldn't help but show it to all, and I mean all of her friends. I didn't mind one bit, of course.

She deserves way more than she is getting right now for the labour that she has done for my brother and me. If I could make one wish, it would be to make my mother way happier than she has ever been this Christmas and her 52nd birthday. In a tiny weeny bit, I feel weird that she's getting older. There's joy in old age, most certainly, but the feeling of time passing and changing things can be weird. But that's the cycle of life, in a nutshell.

Notwithstanding. I'll try to make the most of the time in this season to make it a memorable one, regardless of how I may have felt before. I think things may be a little different when I get home and feel the atmosphere for myself. Let's see how it goes.