I’ve discovered the best thing about Christmas: doing nothing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/23/best-thing-christmas-doing-nothing

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All year long, my daughters and I have been running from one activity to another. Now we can stop, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes

One of the upsides of single parenthood is that, by and large, I am immune to the delusion that things will ever be perfect – by which I mean neat, on time, or put away in the proper place. Instead, things will always be messy and there will never be time, which seems to me a useful baseline from which to measure one’s progress. There is only one period when this rule is suspended, and it’s the week heading into Christmas.

I never thought I was a Christmas fanatic. I didn’t love it particularly, but I didn’t hate it either; and while, through my 20s and early 30s I never bothered with a tree, I could be sentimental about carols from King’s and got jumpy at the thought, say, of having beef instead of turkey – even though no one likes turkey, but that’s how it’s done and you have to do it or else. I guess the signs were always there.

This is the first year since my kids were born that we haven’t been travelling for Christmas and outsourced the problem to someone else by spending the day at their house. Instead, we are at home in New York, and I have found myself panicking. Along with moral guidance, dental health and how to talk about death, I haven’t felt ready for the task of authoring “Christmas memories” for my kids – that potentially rich trove for future therapists that will shape their festive spirit, God willing, for the next 80 years.

It’s not as though I had Thanksgiving as a dry run. As a British person it’s not my holiday and I felt free to spend it with non-observant friends. We ordered in BBQ, made margaritas all afternoon and did nothing remotely traditional, while the kids crawled on the floor. It was sublime. But Christmas is different.

For weeks now, it has seemed as if my almost-five-year-olds have been on the brink, in this diverse city where every public Christmas tree stands next to a menorah, of realising the whole thing is made up. “Santa only visits people who celebrate Christmas,” said my daughter this week, and I waited for her to follow this thought to its natural conclusion. “Lucky we celebrate Christmas!” she said. Meanwhile her sister is preoccupied with the idea of omniscience. “Does Santa know everything,” she asked.

“No. He just knows a lot.”

“Is Santa a scientist?”

“I don’t think so.” Is this right? I have no idea, the whole thing seems ludicrous and, simultaneously, hideously weighted.

I bought a plastic tree with built-in lights. I panic-ordered a lot of things on Amazon. I eyed up a big turkey in the supermarket even though my kids won’t touch turkey unless it’s coated in breadcrumbs; and I thought about marching them up to Riverside Church for the crib service.

I might still do that. But in the midst of this activity I had a revelation. All year, we’ve been running. Every weekend we bounce between this lesson and that, this play date and that party. We’re frequently late and always exhausted so that all my kids want, next week, is to be home, hanging out, with no one yelling at them to get their coats on and run out the door. I realised that the perfect Christmas was one in which no greater idea was chased than having nothing to do, nowhere to go and no schedule to follow until January.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist