A Christmas Morning post near the end of March

I don’t know how many of you follow the PostSecret Project. I believe it’s fairly well-known, although I stumbled upon it by accident and haven’t really talked to anyone else who’s heard about it, but I will, as best I can, briefly summarize what it’s about. The basic premise is that PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people (anonymously) design a postcard telling some secret that they’ve held deep down and never told anyone, and then mail it to a P.O. box where they are collected and displayed. Each Sunday, a new set of postcards is displayed on the website (linked to above). Each Sunday, I check it, and almost always without fail, there is at least one postcard that really moves me, and one postcard which I really feel like I connect with. I checked it today to see the new batch, and saw this one, which really struck a chord with me:





I’ve been feeling this way for several Christmases, but really never was completely conscious of it until the last one. In the olden days, I’d be up before the sun, alarms set for 6:30 A.M., upstairs in the living room checking out the presents and rooting through the stockings (mom and dad told us we could open the presents in the stockings without having to wait for them to wake up). I was always the first one up, so I’d check everything out before I went to wake up my brother and sister, and we’d all sit around, shaking and looking at boxes, playing the guessing game. Mom and dad said that we weren’t allowed to wake them up before 8, but we were always in their bedroom pestering at 7:30, and by 7:45 they’d given in. Then we’d give in. Mom and dad would sit with their coffee, telling us which one to open, always saving the most tantalizing one for last. We’d throw paper all over, not caring about the mess, and each present always managed to be more exciting than the last. When we were all done, we’d lay out the loot, and we couldn’t contain our excitement as we tried to figure out which toy to play with first, which CD to listen to, which movie to watch, which candy to eat. It was always a day of choices and priorities, love and family, fun and excitement…

…And now, I wake up around 11, when my brother wakes me up. I tell him I’m sleeping and I’ll be up in a little bit, but he insists, and so I grudgingly roll out of bed, put on a shirt and some pajama pants, and go upstairs. Mom and dad, Taylor and Carly, are already up, waiting for me. I try to be excited. I open gifts, one by one, grateful for the thought and love, but really, it just seems like just another day where everything is closed and my mom makes a fancy dinner, and I have some new stuff to temporarily entertain me… for a little bit, at least. Though it never takes long for the fun to wear off.

And so I ask myself what happened? Is this a natural part of “growing up,” as it were? Have I lost something? If so, can I get it back? And if so, how? I’ve been told that Christmas morning will be exciting again when I have kids. Maybe so, but I feel that it’s one of those moments that should always be magical, that should always be exciting…. Back to the days when I believed in Santa and left carrots and glitter out in the snow for the reindeer, the days when my uncles would give us updates on where Santa had been sighted throughout Christmas eve, when every red light in the sky was Rudolf’s nose, when the sun waited for me and my parents pretended to be annoyed and Grandma made more cookies than we could imagine. Back to the days when magic and excitement still existed, and I believed in them both.