Christ-mas decorating

Every year I hang out for the end of November/early December. I LOVE Christmas decorating, and usually it was a big event in our family to decorate the Christmas tree together.  We would usually get right into it - we would put the Christmas carols on really loud, Aaron would put the decorations up around the house, while the boys and I would decorate the tree together (and I would move the decorations around while the boys weren't looking!), while Noah usually snoozed away on the couch.

Last year it was really hard to get into the mood to decorate the house for Christmas. It was just two months since Noah passed away and Aaron and I both didn't want to do it, but the boys were still excited about Christmas.

This year is even worse and I have no desire at all to do anything for Christmas  - decorating or otherwise.  I'm okay, but would rather just skip December and January all together.  Every day is hard, but it's especially hard at this time of the year when everyone is talking about Christmas and getting excited for it.

I absolutely hate going into town where there's hundreds of people rushing around doing Christmas shopping, carols playing in all the shops and Christmas decorations every where.

It's hard seeing things come up on my Facebook wall to do with Christmas.  People counting down the days, posting pics of their decorated trees, and doing cute things like 'elf on the shelf'.  I just wish I could hide away from it all.

I probably sound like the grinch but it's so hard to feel happy and excited this year, when all I want is to have Aaron and Noah here.  I'm happy for other people to be excited about Christmas, and I hope people don't avoid mentioning it or talking about it around me. It's just that I would much prefer to skip the whole month.

Unfortunately it's not that easy, especially when you have three little boys who are just as excited about Christmas as they always are.  It's probably a good thing that they are excited, because they keep me going and make me realise that life does go on, despite wishing you could just hide from it sometimes.

I was really dreading putting up our tree this year, and hoped that the boys would understand if I asked them what they thought about not doing it this year.   I'm lucky that they are so understanding, because they all said it was okay to not put it up this year.  I promised them that next year would be a lot easier and happier for all of us.

I'm so glad they were okay with it, because looking at a beautiful tree every night would just be too hard.  Instead I just pulled out our nativity scene and other decorations that remind us of the real reason for the season. 

I know that without Christ being born we could not live again, so really this year I have more to celebrate at this time of the year than ever. Because He came, it means that I will be with Aaron and Noah again.

It's still very hard to feel like celebrating when your heart just feels so sad, so instead of putting our tree up I just pulled out all our smaller ones and put them on the bookshelves instead.

We then went to the cemetery and decorated Noah's tree at his grave.  We decided that this would be our Christmas tree this year.

Noah's grave is now covered again with beautiful lush green grass.  It's keeps me busy going up every day to water it, but it's worth it to see how nice it looks.  The family of the little boy next to Noah also go up every day to water Thomas' grave.  The rest of the grass around the cemetery has quickly dried out with all the beautiful warm days we've been having.

During the week I found a live potted tree for Aaron's grave.  If anyone loved Christmas it was Aaron. He was seriously worse than a kid at Christmas.  I remember sharing his love for Christmas in my eulogy at his funeral.  I just had to mention it because he made me laugh with how he knew what he wanted for Christmas six months before, and would be more excited than the boys!

Yesterday we went and decorated his little tree at the cemetery. I also took up his Hawks snow globe that a student had given him at Christmas one year.  Harri insisted on decorating it himself.

It's crazy how different this December is to just two years ago.  Last week Harri made me laugh when he said 'Mum in 2010 we had 6 people in our family, then 2011 came - 'bam!' - 5 people, then 2012 - 'bam!' - 4 people'. It's nice to have a laugh about it sometimes because it's still so unbelieveable even almost a year on since Aaron passed away. It's still so strange to know that Aaron's body is at the cemetery.

Posts about putting the tree up (just after Noah came out of hospital) in 2009 here, 2008 here, and 2007 here (I'm so glad that I started blogging a long time ago and have all these memories to look back on).