Last night was the kids’ Christmas program at our church. It was beautiful and Spirit-filled, and such a blessing to everyone who heard their sweet message of Jesus’s birth. The program was filled with nostalgia because of the ancient hymns the children sang (and these cute angel costumes…which may also have been ancient, but they were so sweet.)
Nostalgic is probably the best way to describe our Christmas celebrations this year. I mean, obviously, not nostalgic because our family is sitting around remembering Christmases past. We’re way too overwhelmed with the Tae Kwon Do belt testing and teacher gifts. No, our Christmas is nostalgic because our celebrations aren’t gorgeous or over-the-top. For the most part, they’re sweet. Quaint. Nostalgic.Someone more cynical may describe our decorations as delightfully tacky (which I think is also the Hooters slogan, which makes that an inappropriate slogan for our Christmas). But Christmas with four small children can only be homespun, can’t it?
To make my point… a fancy friend of mine posted her two Christmas trees on Instagram. First, she posted her Fancy Tree, which was bee-yoo-tee-ful. Cherubs and (real) silver bells and coordinating ribbon swirled inside and out of the branches of the massive tree. You get the idea. The tree belonged on the cover of a Pottery Barn catalog.
Then she posted her Nostalgia Tree.
Y’all. The Nostalgie Tree (the one with all the kids’ homemade ornaments) STILL made ours look…a little delightfully tacky. True, her sweet kids are in high school. Maybe you can kind of weed out the REALLY crazy craft ornaments by then? Maybe by then you can call your tree nostalgia and not tacky?
Does this mean our Christmas tree will one day look different? Maybe in ten years I’ll have my beautiful tree downstairs. My nostalgia tree will be upstairs, with only the kids’ best crafts still on it.
And the picture of this tree will really be nostalgic because it will remind me of the years this tree sat in my living room…
….and I loved it.
