Little Christmas, big Christmas

The lights, the scents, the familiar and new shared holiday activities, the feelings they evoke - the best, most exciting part of the year, the season of anticipation. At the end of it stands the brightest day, the one worth waiting for: Christmas. It has come again.

We rush around, place orders, wait for couriers, chase couriers, look for cash, wake with a start at dawn because we remember that one of the children’s presents hasn’t arrived and we have no idea where it might be, just as we have no idea what we’ll eat on Christmas Eve or the day after Christmas... This is just an average day before December 24. Those who are lucky have only 1-2 such days; for those who are less fortunate, this is what the whole month is about. Yet it used to be different.

Do you remember what the holiday was like as a child? We didn’t notice the stress, of course not; we simply felt a kind of pleasant excitement throughout, especially around the 22nd or 23rd, when only one or two little windows remained closed on the Advent calendar.

We knew that in the days before Christmas, or at least on the day before, our parents were already home too, cooking the dishes we never ate on any other day of the year, as well as those we couldn’t even understand how anyone could eat as children (aspic?!).

Do you remember the long walks on Christmas Eve, when you could run into half the city because, strangely enough, everyone set out for a walk with their grandparents or dad at the same time? Do you remember the excitement inside us, because we suspected there was a reason we had to parade around in our nice clothes and snowsuits - some kind of magic would be waiting for us at home? On the way home, we watched to see which windows already had Christmas trees shining in them, because that was a good sign: Baby Jesus had already visited there.

Many people went to a Nativity play that day, before the celebrations. It was a great experience even for those who didn’t set foot in a church even once during the rest of the year, but would never have missed the Nativity play for anything. There was something in the music and in the lines recorded 30 years earlier that could touch even a very young child - and of course every little girl envied the lucky older girl who got to play Mary that year. Or the lead angel. These were real dream roles.

Do you remember coming home from your walk/the cinema/church and, miraculously, finding all your relatives already there, everyone dressed up, no longer stressing over dinner but somehow genuinely relaxed as they waited for the children? At least, that’s how it seemed to the children. Behind the scenes, someone was surely still frantically wrapping presents in a back room, but we didn’t see that. We only saw Dad suddenly disappear to “check whether everything is all right in the living room,” whose door someone closed only once a year, at Christmas. Then we knew that if we listened very carefully, we would hear the sound we had been waiting for all day (no, we don’t mean the Christmas tree falling over, although that happened too, and apparently “the angels bumped into it...”), the ringing of the bell and the music (in 8 and a half out of 10 homes, “Hark, the Angel” from Heaven, right).

And then we saw the Christmas tree and the presents for the first time. What we had been longing for so long - and no, we don’t just mean the packages, but the atmosphere that surrounded us there. Everyone we loved dearly was there, everyone was in a good mood (except perhaps one or two small children who hadn’t received what they had asked for), and everyone was laughing, even with relatives they barely spoke to during most of the year. In short, everything was perfectly fine.

Why did we tell you all this? Because our parents and grandparents probably didn’t always experience that day this way. They surely did worry about whether the fish soup would turn out well, whether the tree would fall over, whether everyone had received all their presents, whether the other cousin would arrive by evening or only at the end of the celebration - and we could go on; these were perhaps the smaller problems. But we children didn’t notice any of it then. Because we were only looking for the magic, and that was all we saw, because that was what they showed us. And that is exactly why we try so hard now, why we get excited and worry, because we want to give our own children what we received from our parents. A carefree, genuine Christmas that they will always remember as the most beautiful of days.

We hope you manage to make this happen too, along with everything else you have planned and everything you wish for! We wish you a very Merry Christmas, plenty of rest, and many, many joyful moments together with those who matter most to you!