Growing Into - 2nd Edition

There are many things that get too small for us while we grow up and into our lives. Our lives can feel like some traditions don't fit anymore. Festive seasons and the traditions we grow up with change. There is so much nostalgia to consider, especially at these times. It can be so easy to slip into feeling lost and lonely making it difficult to recall and reshape the warm fuzzy things. This little story, first written on Boxing Day, 2015, has also been edited and reshaped. 

Growing Into ~ 2nd Edition

It was the day after. On this day after Christmas, Roberta felt such a lovely quiet. Some people went to the mall for the great Boxing Day sales. A repeat of the Christmas shopping madness and yet a screeching reverse. Roberta never liked that craziness. She had vowed many Christmas’s ago to not participate in either. It was the year ‘Bobbi’ had graduated from high school, got her first job and her first apartment. In the fall when people gearing up for Christmas she decided that her holiday season was going to be exactly that ~ a holiday season. The shopping trips that her mother had insisted on were going to stop. 

Bobbi loved decorating her apartment in reds and greens, gold and silver, bells and angels. She and her girlfriends had made parties out of decorating each other’s apartments. Oh, they did go shopping. But Bobbi, and her friend Emi, always was finished before the others. They would go to lunch, take their finds home and spent the rest of their afternoon wrapping their gifts. That first Christmas, when she woke up Christmas morning, in her quiet apartment, it had totally felt weird. She didn’t stay home long. She ripped open one of her presents, put all the rest of them in a glossy red and white shopping bag, and jumped in the shower. All showered and dressed in a brand new Christmas outfit she drove quickly across town to her parents home where she spent the day unwrapping and squealing over her gifts, as though she were still a teenager.

That first Boxing Day was when she felt the quiet. Her adult life was taking shape. She had slept in, as she planned. Made a special breakfast of waffles, strawberries and whipped cream for herself, as planned. While stirring the waffle batter, she hummed a Christmas tune. Catching her reflection in the shiny new tea kettle her mother gave her she saw a grown up. Her parents had named her Roberta. Tilting her head to one side, she said her name out loud. 'Roberta'. Than began humming again. Finished breakfast, still in her Christmas pyjamas, she took her cup of tea and curled up on her ratty old sofa from a second hand store. Roberta opened her new book from her grandma. Wrapped cosily in her old quilt from home, with James Taylor on the stereo and sunshine in the window, she dozed. Plans to go the the Boxing Day sales, dissolved in the  cozy warmth that her held her fast. Her phone played a bit of jazz. It was Emi and Rheina calling her for a movie, something they always did on Boxing Day. A special tradition, the three girls had vowed to keep even into adulthood.

As Boxing Day came to a close, Roberta’s ideas about how to ‘do’ Christmas and Boxing Day became her own. Since that first Boxing Day, the Christmas season was always exciting and fun. As much as possible, she went to church with her parents for services on Christmas Eve and felt at peace. Christmas Day was spent with her own growing family whether in her own home or with her parents. Sometimes it was a gathering of friends and 'Christmas orphans'. Boxing Day had become her own special day to revel in ~ without sales and frenzied, crowded malls. Reading a new Christmas book, walking in crisp winter air, a movie with old friends or new, or just on her own. She had learned and was still learning what it was to grow into her own life.

“Don’t try to make me grow up before my time…”

~ Louisa May Alcott,  Little Women