Christmas Eve in Sweatpants
By: René Junge
Tags: Personal, Christmas, This Happened To Me, Holidays, Perspective

Christmas Eve in Sweatpants

Photo by Les Anderson on Unsplash

In recent years, Christmas Eve has always been a wonderful event, but also very stressful.

By two o’clock in the afternoon at the latest, my wife and I had to be in the car to make it to my first job as Santa on time.

Since we don’t have any children ourselves, it has become customary for me to play Santa for our friends’ children. We have many parents in our circle of acquaintances, and somewhere there is always a child who is not too old to believe in Santa Claus.

This task has always given me a lot of pleasure. The children’s eyes and the families’ reaction to their excitement was always priceless.

But it was also exhausting. All the shopping for Christmas had to be done by that day, and all the presents had to be wrapped at least a day before.

The long car rides in the warm Santa suit were not pleasant. In the last two years, I even had two missions as Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, which stretched over several hours with the drives and the gift-giving. When I was finally done, I was sweaty down to my underwear.

In the evening, we always visited friends. There, I first had to change clothes and wash up before I could join the others. There was no time to go home between the Santa assignments and the party.

This year, none of that is possible. We don’t get to see our families on Christmas Eve or the two Christmas holidays. My parents have health problems and are over seventy years old. I could not justify exposing them to the danger of contracting the insidious Coronavirus.

Our friends also celebrate the holiday alone. Only on one of the three days of Christmas do we see my uncle and aunt, who live on our street. They, just like us, went into a one-week voluntary quarantine before the feast to minimize the risk. They were also the only ones we had closer contact with in the last two weeks.

But today, the twenty-fourth of December, the day when Christmas is at its peak in Germany, my wife and I are spending it all alone.

We have nothing to do this time. All the presents were sent to the post office days ago and the Christmas Eve dinner will be simple.

We’ve slept in, we’ll walk around in sweatpants all day, and we’ll make ourselves comfortable on the couch.

However, the thought of not visiting anyone this time and not celebrating the holiday doesn’t make us sad at all. We have each other, and that is more than enough.

At Christmas, we should come to rest and leave everyday life behind us. In the last few years, rest was out of the question. It was still lovely, and we look forward to when it will be like it used to be.

But this one year we are looking forward to Christmas being different than usual. It will be beautiful in a different way than we are used to.

I wish you, wherever you are and however you spend the holidays, a Merry Christmas.

Please don’t be sad that life is forcing us to take everything down a notch this year. Enjoy this break from normalcy and make it count.

Celebrate the silence and put on your sweatpants. This year Christmas is different, but it doesn’t have to be worse.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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