To Decorate or Not to Decorate?

I’m at a quandary. Part of me wants to decorate for Christmas like we’ve never decorated before since there isn’t much else to look forward to in the upcoming holidays. Yet, there is another part of me that just wants to keep it basic. After all, no one else will be in our house except for the two of us and the thought of putting it all up only to dismantle it again shortly seems futile in a way.

We put a few things out a couple of weeks ago, and it’s nice to have the house looking somewhat Christmas-y. I was initially looking forward to putting out all of the rest of our things, but now as time has waned on, I’m not so sure if I want to bother with the rest. The truth is that I just don’t have the same kind of energy this year. I don’t think I’m alone on that one either. Maybe the real gift for this year aside from being in good health (God willing) is affording ourselves the gift of time in not overdoing it or making it seem like just another chore to do in a year that already seems chore-laden.

Where I’m really grappling is with respect to our Christmas tree. It is an artificial one that we’ve had for a few years now. We finally managed to get it properly lit given that some of our ‘pre-lit’ sections had burned out and needed replacing as is usually the case, but I’m thinking that our star on the top is all that is still needed. While I just wrote about how meaningful our ornaments are in my previous post, I, once again, just don’t feel like digging everything out. For some reason, there’s a part of me that would feel guilty for not hanging up our special memories since Christmas comes but once a year, but then the whole notion of just keeping it simple seems more enticing. Our tree is very pretty as is and we’ve commented in years past about leaving it with just the lights—maybe this is the year to try it? However, now that I’m faced with what to do, it somehow doesn’t feel right if we leave our treasured things tucked away in boxes in the basement. Or, does it? Is it wrong to want to keep things on the easy side? Am I reluctant because I’m holding myself to some kind of unwritten standard or something? I really don’t know, but I can tell you that I’m leaning toward the idea of keeping it more on the simple side of things amongst this year of out and out craziness.

My husband is indifferent. He is normally a very tradition-oriented, very sentimental person as well but when I posed the idea of not doing a whole lot more for Christmas around here, he kind of liked it. Less to have to do overall and more time for relaxing. Maybe that’s exactly what holiday season 2020 is supposed to be about: Giving ourselves permission to do the minimum in order to maximize us and time spent together as opposed to all of the usual fussing. Minimize doing to maximize being. I like it! A present for the present.