How I stole Christmas

I celebrated my first Christmas this year (I wrote this in December 2025 so let’s assume that’s when you’re reading this). For the past 22 years of my life, December has always offered chances to reflect. There’s less newness to it, rolling the yarn back into its basket, fires burning low — an unhurried pause to take stock of what has been made, what has unravelled, and what remains unfinished. This year was different.

We build gingerbread houses in between stuffing our faces with marshmallows and candy canes. Everyone’s busy embellishing the little Christmas tree next to the table with Dr. Seuss and $5 target mugs sitting under the nose of the TV. Today, peppermint mochas and Christmas shopping! Tomorrow, movie night with Santa cookies! Friday, we exchange presents!

It may sometimes seem like work to measure and manage social battery, but in the middle of whimsy like this, limits feels unnecessary. And yet, even more than the confections or the ornaments, what lingers with me now are the choices - tiny, deliberate choices about how we spent time together. There was no checklist. No must-do rituals. Just a gentle asking of one another. What feels like care? What feels like home? The answers weren’t grand, they were in the way someone laughed when a gumdrop fell off the gingerbread roof, or the entire roof broke down and the neighbours could hear us yelling at each other for demolishing gingerbread cities, in the way each present was carefully chosen with a memory tucked inside it, in the way the living room couch became a fort for our best stories.

I am not Christian, and I say this not as a disclaimer but as a quiet astonishment. Setting boundaries of belief aside, this felt like something sacred anyway. Not because of religion, but because of intent. There was warmth here that didn’t demand belief, only presence; generosity that asked only for thought; laughter that lingered long after the marshmallows melted. We made space together in a way that felt like belonging, a warmth that isn’t performance, a thoughtfulness that isn’t duty. A rhythm I’ll remember not because it was perfect, but because it was present.

And as I watched it unfold, something settled in me, this isn’t a holiday I’ll want to skip. Even if I don’t carry a creed of Christmas in my soul, I will carry this beauty of intentional togetherness into every December that follows. I can already imagine my children, years from now, wrapping presents by lamplight as cookie crumbs linger on the table, or slipping candy canes into their pockets because it feels like home. I can imagine them making their own tradition, not necessarily the same as ours, but shaped by the language of care we learned here. And so, even with the beginning of new traditions, I find myself slipping into my usual December spirit, a bit different this time — not what new things I’ll do next year, but what things that I did this year will I repeat next year? To this December and to every December that will come.