When we were young, the holidays announced themselves long before the calendar confirmed their arrival. December brought small yet unmistakable bursts of cheer: the glow from the lights neighbors put up, the smell of pine sneaking in every time the front door opened, the way the world outside seemed to hush itself every night as if waiting for something wonderful. When we were little, the holidays didn’t just happen; they arrived, softly and beautifully, like a secret only the children of the world were allowed to understand.
Everything smelled like sugar and cinnamon, and time stretched slowly, as if the universe knew we would one day regret not having basked in the feeling of the holidays for just a minute longer. Back then, the holidays weren’t something we prepared for. They were something we felt in our being. Every breath, blink, and sigh was a sign of how soft and wondrous the world was simply because it was December.
Somewhere along the way, time kept turning, and we were forced to age alongside it. The holidays stopped arriving with the same gentle certainty. Instead, they crept in quietly, almost apologetically, as if they were unsure whether we still wanted them. December used to feel like a warm blanket; now it feels more like a reminder of how much has changed, and of how much we didn’t notice that change until it was too late.
The holidays may have started to feel different when we began to understand, slowly and painfully, that the magic was never in the decorations, or the cookies, or the gifts. It was the people who stayed up until 2 a.m. to make the morning feel effortless. It was in the adults who held the stress that we were too young to see, who stitched together every memory we have with their hands. Growing up felt like the threads of our memories came undone as we tried to quietly recreate a feeling we didn’t know was woven by others.
There is a strange ache in realizing that the holidays don’t feel the same anymore because the people who made them feel that are now older, gone, far away, or just different. Adulthood carried us miles away from homes that once held everything that ever mattered. Yet, for two fragile weeks, we drift back to a brief moment, remembering the bones of what used to be our lives. We come back expecting everything to feel the same, but it doesn’t, and it probably never will again. The house is quieter, and the couch we once fought our family over feels smaller. Even the air feels thinner, like the walls of our homes have been holding their breath while we were gone.
We walk into our childhood bedrooms and realize they are stuck in time, frozen versions of the people we no longer are, preserved as if the world stopped turning on the day we packed our bags and left. The holidays pull us into this strange in-between: part guest, part ghost, part memory. We’re home, but not entirely. Grown, but not completely. As we sit at the kitchen table where we once cried over our homework, we feel the quiet shift. The understanding that life has been moving forward without us fully knowing, and in our own way, we’ve been moving forward without it, too.
For two brief weeks, we try to force ourselves back into a place where we once fit perfectly, knowing deep down that the seams of magical memories will never be as tight as they once were. There is a moment, brief but still there nonetheless, when we pause in the middle of wrapping a gift or hanging a light, and we think, “Oh, this is what my parents must have felt.” The exhaustion, the pressure, the quiet hope that someone would feel a spark of joy from a gift or idea that we put our heart into. The feeling is heavy, yet sacred.
Perhaps the hardest part about all of this is that we never noticed the last time things were the same. We never knew when the final time we would wake up on Christmas morning as kids would be. We didn’t know the final holiday with everyone at the table was already behind us. Every year we return home, and for the time we are there, we sit in the soft glow of a place that was once our whole world. And even though it hurts, even though it is different, we have to love it because it’s the closest we’ll ever come to touching the past again.
That might be the quiet miracle of growing up. Little by little, the magic of the holidays finds its way back to us in new and different ways. In the way we lean into hugs a little longer, in the way we notice the people in the room versus the gifts. Maybe the holidays don’t feel the way they used to because we finally learned what the real meaning of them was. We can carry the magic we once felt in the dishes we make, in the songs we know by heart, without remembering the first time we even learned them, and in the way we straighten an ornament on the tree as someone once did when they thought no one was looking.
So yes, the holidays don’t feel the same. They never will again. But that is the gift hidden underneath the ache we feel, because now when we gather in those familiar rooms, we understand just how fleeting and precious each moment is. And if that makes our hearts ache, then maybe that ache is simply proof that the magic is still alive in us, quietly growing into something new.