Dec

7

Cure for the doldrums

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While I have been struggling a bit to find the holiday spirit lately, Dylan is the Dahoo-Dores singing Dilly Lou Who to my inner Grinch. He has such faith in Santa I’ve found myself in at least one awkward conversation about whether that factory at the North Pole really makes every present a kid gets, like even Amazon gift cards? (Me: “Uhhhhh so I think Santa has some ummmm strategic partnerships with certain retailers and manufacturers, in addition to elf labor …”), and he seems to one hundred percent believe that a stuffed elf is moving around on its own each night.*

Dylan’s pure joy at seeing a familiar ornament or re-watching A Christmas Story or driving around to marvel at neighborhood lights or placing gumdrops on the roofline of a gingerbread house or arranging the stockings just so, because that’s how they hang every year — if there is a bit of a meh-shaped hole in my ho-ho-ho this year, he is for sure the antidote.

I don’t know how much longer he’ll the true believer he is today, but I hope his love for tradition lasts forever.

(*Speaking of That Damned Elf, I did this idiotic and possibly/probably immoral thing the other day where I took a picture of it while holding its fey little body, which, if you have one of these elves, you know is a big no-no — no touching allowed lest you drain its powers with your stupid muggle fingers, or something — and then I forgot about the photo until Dylan was flipping through my phone and was totally horrified, like, “Mom, is Relf in your hand??” at which point I snatched it away from him and quickly deleted the image while insisting that no, no, of course not honey, that was just a photo I’d taken that morning of the elf sitting in our tree, because he was just so adorable up there, and then I distracted him with a YouTube video of a sneezing Pomeranian. Christmas: a time for magic, a time for gaslighting.)

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