Awesome Disabled

I’ve been wrapping my kids’ presents this evening. They are at their dad’s this week, and I wanted to surprise them.

This will be our first holiday in my new place. As with anything in life, it’s hard to do something new. But it’s also hard to continue with painful realities, so sometimes newness is a necessity. I blasted “We Need a Little Christmas” on my Google speaker (Glee version, natch), and we pulled out all the holiday stuff I had carefully tucked into the crawl space during the move.

My teenager, Lis, was surprisingly into the holiday decoration spree. She carefully hung all the ornaments onto the tree while Cleo was a whirling dervish with everything else, filling every corner of the house with manufactured cheer.

If it were up to me, I probably wouldn’t bother with cheer. Winter in this frozen land of ice and snow is a survival game for me. My version of a holiday celebration is a German advent candle with the numbers 1-24 on it. You burn one number each day. It cheers me up and it makes the long nights less gloomy. It’s simple and cozy.

I don’t so much go for wreaths and boughs and sparkles and red bows. I don’t like them, but I understand them. I understand why we have come to associate red and green with the winter season; in a frigid white winter landscape, a dot of red berries and a spot of evergreen show us that this dark season won’t last forever. We try to re-create that feeling of hope for ourselves with plastic and fabric and glitter.

And all of this is great, as points of pontification. But I’m a parent of kids, and they deserve some magic. They haven’t had an easy go of it– between Covid and their parents splitting up, not to mention the general ableism of society that makes it so hard for me sometimes. They don’t deserve that. They need a little Christmas, right this very minute. Candles in the window, carols at the spinet.

After we had emptied our decoration bins, Cleo asked that, since we have more space now, we buy some more decorations. I wanted to say no, of course, but I said yes. While Lis was at climbing class, Cleo and I bought some light-up snowflakes and a wooden deer, along with gift tags ($6 whole dollars!) and gift wrap. I did say no to an inflatable Christmas cat outdoor decoration, but that’s because I’m not willing to commit to that level of ostentatiousness in my new neighbourhood.

So this evening, I wrap up Cleo’s and Lis’s gifts in the new gift wrap I bought. Gift wrap is always hard for me, because it’s meant to be thrown away. I usually prefer to reuse a piece of newspaper or magazine, or even paintings from my children. And heaven knows, my children produced enough paintings to wrap gifts throughout their early childhoods. But this year, it’s purchased gift wrap for us– Cleo and I bought an 8-pack, for nine whole Canadian dollars. I gritted my teeth at the price tag, and at the general to-do of holiday merrymaking.

My instinct was to wrap all the presents in one style of paper, so that I might finish out the roll, and could reduce the storage load. But of course that’s silly. So I opened up a new pack for each present I wrapped. The patterns clash slightly with each other, but that’s not the point. The point is whimsy and cheerfulness. Taking a time of darkness, and turning towards those we love, and offering them gifts to show how much we appreciate them.

I know holiday marketing and the capitalism machine continues to grind; billionaires don’t pay their workers enough and don’t pay enough in taxes. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and all that. These are heavy truths, and they are allowed to sit heavily.

But for now, I will wrap my children’s presents in brightly-colored paper, with ostentatious ribbons and gift tags. I will place them beneath an artificial tree (bought second-hand after my marriage ended) covered with bright ornaments and flashing lights by my two favorite people in the world.

Cheer may be spending time, energy, and money I don’t want to spend, but life can be a dreary slog. I’ve decided that it’s okay to be inefficient, if the other side of the equation is that we can create some joyful family memories. Some things are more important than efficiency.