Christmas crashed Halloween’s party this year.
It’s been a rough 2023. My father passed away. My sister has terminal cancer. Around the world there are wars, desperation, fear.
At times, the darkness seems overwhelming.
So I’ve ushered out Daylight Savings Time with strings of lights, a colorful tree and a sprinkling of red-and-green accessories. I met the early sunset with a battalion of Christmas décor.
Most of my adult life I have been the one setting boundaries for Christmas.
“Stay in your month, Christmas.”
“Stop upstaging Thanksgiving.”
I was the one fighting temptation to reclaim the living room on Christmas night.
Christmas can be pushy, overwhelming, a visitor who has overstayed its welcome. I like my house neat, clean, open. Too much Christmas always turned too quickly into too much stress and too much mess.
But this year, things aren’t different. This year, life is hard. This year, mess is the least of my stress.
In early November, with Halloween fresh in the memory and its leftovers still filling the bowl, I began ushering in the silver and gold.
Not that Thanksgiving should be pushed aside. Gratitude, especially in times of struggle, is a comfort and a must. But Thanksgiving doesn’t come with twinkling lights and glittery snow globes and musical memories.
So now my home is a Thanksgiving-Christmas mashup, a blend of autumn running into winter.
You reach a point in life — if you’re lucky to live long enough, I suppose — when you’re losing more loved ones than gaining. Your parents, your siblings, your friends, your former coworkers are closing the books on their life journeys.
It has become a struggle to even open Facebook some days because there is so much health crisis and loss.
Years back, I remember wondering about the expected Baby Boomer “tsunami of death.” It makes sense that such a large generation in birth must close with a reciprocal number of deaths.
In 1999, Baby Boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — became the largest living generation in the United States. They held that title until 2019, when Millennials — born between 1981 to 1996 — took the reins, according to Pew Research.
There were benefits to growing up a Boomer. Our sheer numbers brought political power, produced incredible talent and instilled fundamental changes to the work/parenthood/education landscape.
But there also have been disadvantages. We endured competitive job markets, competitive college admissions, competitive everything. It’s hard to make the team when there are 2,500 kids in your class.
And now comes the worst of those downsides. Mortality. We are dying in great numbers.
Of course, I know that a strand of Christmas lights will not delay the inevitable. A pre-lit tree will not fill my home with the long list of late holidays guests who once graced our table. A pine cone centerpiece will not buy my sister time.
But the decorations evoke memories. They make me pause and remember all those hectic holidays when my greatest concern was running out of ice.
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My house was once full on the holidays. The laughter, the chatter, the piles of wrapping paper.
I am so grateful I sent the invitations, did the work, and welcomed the madness again and again, for decades.
My advice to younger generations: Accept the invitations, go to the parties, welcome people into your home, make the memories.
You can have ordinary any old day, but you have to put yourself out there to get joy. And believe me, it is the joy you will remember.
We took those events for granted, as all of us tend to do with the present. Sometimes we focused more on the challenges than the blessings.
And so now that we have all the time in the world to revisit those days, even as our own time is running out, we realize something that breezed past us all these years.
There’s a reason we call today the present. It is a gift, one that will be gone soon enough.
Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years.