Brigitte Bowers: Holiday whirlwind brings pressure

Every October, around this time, I think fondly upon Independence Day. I wish all of our holidays could be as joyful and unencumbered.

Ever since I became a mother, I have liked the Fourth of July best because it is a holiday that requires minimal effort. I do not need to buy anyone presents. I don’t have to cook, other than throw a few slabs of meat onto a grill and open up a bag of chips.

The only real labor required is I must carry my own lawn chair to the downtown parade in Atwater, and sometimes I don’t even bother with that, opting instead to sit on the curb where no one can obstruct my view.

But best of all, Independence Day is the one major holiday, except for New Year’s, for which I do not have to decorate. It remains relatively unfestooned, with a few flags on the front lawn being the most that can be expected of anyone.

Every other holiday we celebrate in our home demands a flurry of labor and activity. It begins the day after Halloween and goes on and on right through Easter, a march through one elaborate meal after another, a seemingly endless stream of occasions for which I must decorate, shop and wrap.

I see the weeks before Halloween as a last dance with sanity before I wake on a Monday morning in late April, having survived yet one more ham, the holiday season finally concluded, my home and family returned to peace once again. By then, I will have cleaned, decorated and basted for Thanksgiving; decorated, baked and bought for Christmas; cooked for New Year’s; cooked and bought for Valentine’s; and cooked and bought for Easter.

But for me, the worst of the holiday season is the decorating. While I love my family and enjoy making it happy, I simply cannot muster much enthusiasm for holiday home décor.

I like my house just the way it is during the months between May and September, and I do not much like holiday embellishments.

Most of them are messy and seem cheap during the day: tarantulas made of felt and wire, sagging in the gray light of a damp fall morning; plastic strings of lights drooping on the trees in front of my home, adjoined to neon-orange extension cords crossing the lawn every which way; malicious-looking blow-up Easter Bunnies, their visages suggesting more rabid rodent than benign and gentle herbivore.

There was a time when I feared this failure to appreciate the joys of holiday decorating was somehow evidence of an insufficient maternal instinct. And so I overcompensated.

When my children were preschoolers, we started off the holiday season with scarecrow stuffing and elaborate pumpkin carving – the kind requiring kits that include tiny saws and blueprints – and proceeded almost without pause to gourd buying and silverware polishing, and leaped into Christmas wreaths and snow globes with abandon.

Each Christmas, I transformed the house, believing that I could impart a sense of Christmas spirit if I just threw enough tinsel at the tree. Only days after I’d spent the previous week agonizing over menu planning and turducken ambitions never realized, I’d begin putting away the paintings and ceramic bowls in my home that I liked best, replacing them with $10 nutcrackers made in China and Santas that sprang to action, ringing bells or ho-ho-ho-ing whenever some living thing passed by.

Once I spent a December afternoon filling my home with yuletide ornamentation, capping it all off with red velveteen bows, the kind available at 99-cent stores. I bought about a hundred of these bows, in sizes ranging from garishly large to alarmingly enormous, and I thumbtacked and tied every last one to the walls, clocks, and fabrics of my living room.

“What do you think of the bows?” I asked my husband when he arrived home that evening.

“Um,” he answered. “There’s a lot of them.”

But my children are now too old to ply with candy canes and blinking reindeer, and so with the passing years, I have found myself less concerned with holiday decorations. It is a relief.

Now I am down to one Christmas tree and a few snow globes. Last year, I did not bother to put up my Advent calendar, and we didn’t even buy our tree until the 22nd of December. Our presents piled in a corner of the living room, I almost forgot that we were supposed to have a tree to go with them.

I do not see these recent lapses as a decline, however. I see them more as a return to sanity, to the years before I convinced myself that a mother’s love could be expressed in wreaths and bows.

This story was originally published October 24, 2014 at 6:33 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Holiday whirlwind brings pressure."