Christmas is...Over??!

I love Christmas. Like, really-really-want-to-hug-and-kiss-it-and-wish-it-happened-every-weekend love it. And this one was so damned perfect that not only does it make up for last year's stressed out debacle, it really sets the standard for years to come. Joshua and I are here in New England, where I have spent 21 of my 22 holiday seasons, and I'm not even going to pretend to be unbiased here. Christmas is just better here.

No, seriously. I think Chicago is brilliant, with the lights on Michigan Ave, the Marshall Fields store windows (Macys? Never heard of them), Christkindlmarket, and ice skating in Millennium Park, and everything else that is so lovely and frantic about the holidays in a big city. It's festive and crazy and I really did enjoy being in the city in the holidays. But Chicago doesn't have rambling old farmhouses with wreaths and candles in every window, and it doesn't have forests of pine trees, and it doesn't have mountains, like the one we drive up every year to my grandparents house.

Most importantly, Chicago doesn't have my grandparents. Or my parents, two brothers and future sister-in-law, and a crazy bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and one very perfect and adorable second cousin who turned 12 days old on Christmas Eve. It doesn't have my grandmother's Swedish meatballs (which I made last year, and I was such an emotional wreck I froze them in paper towels instead of wax paper and had to pick bits of paper out of them as they defrosted. While my mother in law watched. Luckily, they turned out amazing).

I could write all about the wonderful time we had at my grandparents last night, passing around the baby, playing with the little kids, trying to manage a gift exchange for 28 people that lasted well beyond the attention span of those under age 8. Or I could write about what a joy it was to open presents with my husband and my brothers and my parents this morning, wearing matching pajamas from my mom. Our tree is short and wide and my dad had this brilliant idea to put it up on a box, which gives the illusion that it is a well-decorated, floating shrub. It has been the butt of many, many jokes and it looks hilarious, but I don't want to write about that either.

It's 11:26, which means there are 34 minutes of Christmas Day left, and like everytime I visit my family, my memories are wonderful and bittersweet. Because we'll leave in a week, and then we have the busyness of the New Year, and a new semester, and suddenly six months will have passed and my baby cousin will be rolling over and I will have missed it all. I absolutely love Chicago, and our life there, and I can't figure out how to have the best of both worlds. How can I have the life I want with Joshua in a city I love and would happily stay in forever, when most of the people I adore are a thousand miles away? This is what I want to write about - this tug I feel between the place we live and the people I love. Despite my feelings about the obvious superiority of New England holidays, Joshua and I both agree that we can't picture ourselves living here. The schools are bad, the economy is bad, we can't move to Boston because Joshua doesn't like their accents (seriously.) and that would put us an entire THREE thousand miles from his parents.

But it's Christmas, and that's depressing. This has really been a perfect holiday and I haven't gotten out of my pajamas in 24 hours and I'm thrilled to pieces about that, and I'm sitting here looking at our Christmas shrub and loving the fact that we don't have to make any decisions right now. And my whole family is around, and things really could not be better.

Merry Christmas!