New people and traditions help freshen an empty-nester’s Christmas

Each year, as I’m taking down the holiday decorations, I’m always a bit wistful. Another year has come and gone in a rush. Once again I find myself thinking of all the fun of baking cookies, trimming trees and all the traditions that make the holidays special as I hit the reset button for a new year.

This year our son has a new bride, a new toddler and in-laws who live close to them. Our daughter has a full-time job that requires working some holidays. All of which made for some strategic planning and last-minute rushing around to accommodate everyone’s schedule.

Between arrivals, tearing through stockings, presents and dinner, we had about four hours together before the millennials were off visiting friends. And in the silence that followed, I thought about all the changes that are taking place in my life.

I thought about my own parents and wondered how they felt the first year I couldn’t make it back for the holidays. Did they feel a cosmic shift in their universe, a portent of things to come? I was the eldest and first to leave the nest; I graduated college and moved to the Midwest. I came back the first few years but then distance and obligations got in the way.

Later, newly married, my new husband and I came home to spend our first Christmas as a married couple with my widowed mother, my father having passed away six months earlier. What a change that first Christmas was without my father.

When our own kids arrived, we made a few trips to my family home for the holidays until traveling became too expensive and, with toddlers, too daunting. As our kids got older, with sports leagues taking up our summers, we started to travel during the holidays, visiting far-flung destinations and celebrating Christmas and the New Year from Beijing to Boston to Bangkok. In the off years, our kids insisted that they wanted to spend Christmas in their own home, with our own traditions. And we did.

But somehow, the years got away from me. I thought I would have more time with just our little nuclear family. Suddenly, our kids, like those of our neighbors and friends, are grown up, living away from home, finding new loves and starting their own families. It was so sudden that I hardly had time to contemplate the new order of things, contemplate my own cosmic shift, if you will.

We did have a sense of it earlier. A couple of years ago, when our son was at Marine Corps boot camp and our daughter away at college, my husband and I spent our first Easter as ‘empty nesters.’ Easter was another of those holidays when our family would gather, hunt for eggs or chocolate bunnies and have ham and potatoes for dinner. That year, without the kids to cook for, my husband and I had dinner out. It was almost like the Christmas dinner in “A Christmas Story” — although instead of Peking duck, we had Thai food.

This week between Christmas and the New Year represents an ending and a beginning. It’s the end of one year and the beginning of another. There are milestones to remember, events to put behind us and optimism for what the New Year will bring. For me, it’s realizing that the holidays are changing, knowing that in the coming years, some family members will leave us and new family members will take their places.

There will be new favorite recipes added to our holiday meals and strangers at our table who will become friends. And whether there are just two stockings over our fireplace or 10, these changes will be as they should be, as they have been for hundreds of years.

And so as I wrap and store the last of the holiday decorations, I’m beginning to think that next year I’ll go to my childhood home for the holidays. And maybe I’ll give the Christmas toast as my father always did: “To absent friends,” to which I’ll add “… and new traditions.”