Happy Holidays

This post has been on the back burner for a few days now. I had intended to write it during winter break (not Christmas holidays!), but with our whirlwind trip to Toronto and our first family American Christmas and the start of the new school term, time seems to run away from me quickly! However, I wanted to record some thoughts of my first festive season as a US resident.

The war on Christmas

The first interesting thing that you find over here is that despite the majority of people celebrating Christmas, the number of people around here who will wish you Merry Christmas is minimal, with everyone going for the safer and more PC Happy Holidays. Personally, I like Happy Holidays (even though Americans call it a vacation?), but at the same time I can't see how wishing someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas to have a Merry Christmas is going to cause them mental pain; a bit of social awkwardness perhaps, but they're unlikely to slap you or burst into tears. The interesting part is when people use Happy Holidays as a way of making a point, either in sarcasm to show their disdain for being PC, or to show off how PC they can be. In either case, it's interesting to watch and listen to the conversations in not-very-diverse New Hampshire compared to the blanket Merry Christmas in slightly-more-multi-cultural Yorkshire.

Christmas in school

The US believes heartily in the separation of church and state, whilst the UK has no such restrictions. However, I find it interesting again that issues that are only issues because of religious teachings, such as gay marriage, contraception and abortion, are way more contentious over here and are battleground subjects during election campaigns. It also highlights that for all the problems I have with UK politics, the US remains a much more conservative country in a lot of matters (though 2 of 3 states that border New Hampshire have legalized marijuana...).

I digress a little from my original thought process. In my school, there was no Christmas mentioned, only holidays and winter. All the decorations were snow men, Christmas lights and snowflakes. Some classes had twinkly lights up, and my next door neighbors had a Christmas tree, but it was interesting to see everyone very cautiously not talking about Christmas. It made my approach of not discussing Christmas less obvious, and I think it makes it easier for those kids for whom the vacation isn't the most wonderful time of the year.

Proper Adulting

My wife and I often joke about how sometimes we look at each other and realise that we're becoming real adults (someone on the internet talked about it as "adulting" and the phrase stuck with us!). The first time was when someone offered us a six figure mortgage, another was when we found out that we were pregnant each time and a more recent example when we bought a car based on how safe it was and how much storage space it had in it. This year, we reached a new pinnacle on Christmas morning as it was the first time that we had spent it away from either of our sets of parents in our lives. The vicarious excitement of the morning through Jake and Sophie was delightful, as was setting up our own traditions. We still went round to my in-laws in the morning and did the rest of the day as we had done previously, but it felt like another big step of ingraining our lives over here to have our first ever Forbes Wolfson family Christmas by ourselves.

Christmas Tree, oh Christmas Tree

Our house is big. I still get surprised by it every now and again, like when I'm turning the place upside down to look for a Christmas present that Sophie has somehow squirreled away somewhere very safe. However, I've found a way to reduce the size a bit, and that's to buy an enormous tree. I was sent with a brief to not come back with a Charlie Brown tree, and I definitely didn't! This thing is huge, probably somewhere around 11 feet tall, and about 8 feet in diameter at the base. It looks sparsely decorated in places, even with 10 years worth of decorations, lovingly imported from the UK, hanging all over the place. It's become a comforting presence in the house, and I will miss it when it's gone.

Epiphany is tomorrow, which means we really need to take it down and undecorate it, as Jake says. I'm not sure how he'll feel about that, and I'm also not sure where we put the tree! There's around a foot of snow still in our yard which is likely to be added to in the coming days, and I don't relish trying to drag it out into the woods. Maybe I need to bust out my hacksaw and cut it into smaller bits, but I'm not sure how Jake will feel about that either! In either case, I think it's been a great experiment this year, but we'll go for something a little smaller and more manageable next year.

Lighting the House

One of my favorite things about the festive festive season over here is the way that just about everyone decorates their houses with lights. The sparsely populated roads and lack of light pollution in the sky means that even the smallest set of lights "pops" out as you drive along, and there are some houses that cover themselves top to tail in lights, including lit up moving reindeer in the yard and twinkling candles in every window.

I decided that I wanted to copy this design, and quickly found out how hard/expensive this can be! The first thing that you need is miles of electrical cables. I drastically underestimated how far the trees are from my house (combined with the insistence of labelling everything in feet...I don't have an accurate mental image of 40 feet yet!), so had to go back twice to get more cables. I also found that it is massively time consuming to string lights around a tree in a way that looks pretty in the dark. In the end, I settled on a net version that doesn't look great if you look at it too long, but does the job in passing. I also strung twinkle lights on the awning the garage, and that is my favorite part of the final look. It makes the house look cosy and inviting, and those electric candles that haven't been moved/stolen by Sophie just add to that inviting look. The reflection off freshly fallen snow definitely helps the romantic look, as does the knowledge of the warmth and family that await within.