Christmas traditions

For the first time in all my 39 years, I'm not going to be at my parents' house for Christmas. And for the first time in probably 30 years, I'm not going to spend Christmas Eve at the big celebration held by my maternal grandmother's side of the family.

Until just a few days ago, we were still planning to make the two-hour drive south to stay with my parents for a while at Christmas, just like always. The baby isn't due for over three weeks, and at my appointment last week the midwife said she didn't think the baby would be more than a week early. So there was no reason to stay in town. Sure, I've had these continuing premonitions that the baby would be early, but this feeling might be mostly based on my own sense of dread -- I don't want her to be early, therefore I'm convinced she will be.

But it turned out that neither Craig nor I wanted to spend very much time away from home,* so over the weekend I called my parents to tell them that instead of coming to visit for five days as we had originally planned, we were going to scale back to three days. Then it turned into two days. And then it finally occurred to me: we didn't have to go at all. We could just stay home!

This realization was accompanied by such an overwhelming sense of relief that I was surprised. I like celebrating Christmas with my parents, and I like our big extended-family Christmas Eve. I don't want to change our traditions permanently. But this year I am so very glad to be staying put, safe and cozy here at my own house.

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Isaac doesn't have a sense of holiday tradition yet, so he doesn't care where we celebrate. He had been happy we were going to Opa and Oma's house, but he seems just as happy to hear that we're staying home. My parents, as well as my sister and her husband, are going to come to visit us here on Christmas Day, so we'll have a big meal and some present-opening together after all. And Isaac can't read a calendar, so he doesn't care exactly when we celebrate, either! If he was just a little bit older, he might object to having to wait until the afternoon of Christmas Day to open his gifts, but for now he's flexible.

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*And why didn't we want to be gone long? Mostly because we want to be close to home and close to our midwife in case I go into labor, I guess. But for my part I have also been experiencing a bit of the nesting impulse over the last few days, and I didn't want to go away from home without having finished my cleaning and organizing. I was uneasy at the idea of leaving tasks incomplete. There were baby clothes to wash, after all, and birth supplies to organize.

Uh-oh, you may be thinking. Yeah, I also had some uncharacteristic bouts of cleaning and organizing in the days prior to Isaac's birth. Not useful cleaning, for the most part, but somewhat obsessive and misplaced energy -- like organizing the gift wrap. This is similar. For instance, I spent nearly two hours preparing a document containing phone numbers of people to contact when I go into labor, directions from our house to and from the freeway, locations of the nearest hospitals, and so forth. It's a real work of art, beautifully laid out and rigorously annotated. But was it excessive? Oh yeah. That qualifies it as nesting in my book.