Real Life with Lora Wimsatt

What will we remember from this Christmas?

Written by Lora Wimsatt

Did you get everything you wanted for Christmas?

Did your kids receive every gift they had written on their wish lists? Wereyouabletofindeverysingle item that all your family and friends asked for?

Were your “Secret Santa” gifts a hit with the Bunco crowd?

Were your kids’ “$5 gift for a boy/ girl” a success in their classroom?

Did you navigate the Black Friday sales when they started online way back in September to snatch up all the “must have” items and get them loaded into your cart and checked out before they went out of stock?

Did Amazon, UPS, FedEx, the PostOfficeandSanta’ssleighdeliver everything on time? … Does any of that even matter?

A week from now, a month, a year, 10 years, 50 years from now, when we think about Christmas 2021, what will we remember?

Oh, it might go down in history as the year with the disrupted supply chains, the year with delayed deliveries, the year when all the hottest items were out of stock before Halloween and were never available again. Maybe it was even the year the porch pirates nabbed somethingoffyourdoorstep.

But will we really remember Christmas for what we didn’t get?

Instead, maybe we can remember this as the Christmas when Grandma got to hold her great-grandchild for thefirsttime. The year your aunt finally confessed that the secret ingredient in her famous dessert is crushed Twinkies.

The year your uncle, husband and son-in-law managed to get through the entire dinner without anyone starting a political argument that ended with someone grabbing his car keys and someone else slamming a door and everyone else staring at their plates in awkward silence.

The year your teenage daughter – the one who rolls her eyes and heaves huge sighs of “attitude” at pretty much everything – insisted on hanging the frayed, faded felt snowflakeshemadeinkindergarten in a prominent place on the tree, because it was “tradition.” The year your son sacrificed screentime with his online gaming community in order to patiently teach his adoring younger cousin how to play checkers … and let him win.

The year you and your husband exchanged meaningful glances from across the room as your youngest child set up the nativity scene, crowding all the pieces close around the manger “because they want to see the Baby.”

Maybe this will be remembered as the year that Christmas was more than gifts and grabbing and greed.

Maybe this will be remembered as the year Christmas was … Christmas.

And you realized that was everything you ever wanted. OP

LORA WIMSATT is a mother, grandmother and writer. She enjoys the everyday blessings and adventures of life, especially her family.