Emily texted on Sunday night: "What time do you want us, and should we bring anything?" I read it twice. Twenty-seven years old, and this is the first Christmas my daughter has asked me what time to arrive at her own childhood home, like a guest checking the invitation.
Which, this year, she is. And so is Josh.
The plan for this year
Here is how it is shaping up. Emily and Nate drive down from Columbus on the afternoon of the 23rd, about an hour and a half if I-71 behaves. Josh comes up from Cincinnati on the 24th after his last shift at a holiday job. Everyone is here for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and on the 26th, they both drive back. Emily has a shift on the 27th. Josh has his own apartment, friends to see and, he informed me, "stuff to do." I do not ask what stuff.
Three nights for Emily and Nate, two for Josh. That is the whole visit. In past years Josh was home for the full break, three and a half weeks, eating cereal at midnight and sleeping until noon. This year he is a visitor with a duffel bag.
I would be lying if I said that did not sting a bit. It did, for about a day. Then I started thinking about what it actually means for the holiday, and some of it is genuinely better.
Hosting guests instead of housing kids
When kids live with you over the holidays, Christmas is a long, slow drain on the refrigerator. I went back to the green notebook for last December. Our grocery spending was $812 for the month, against a normal $560 or so. Much of that was not the Christmas dinner. It was three weeks of a 21-year-old eating like he was training for something.
This year I am planning it like a short visit with a fixed menu, and I budgeted $340 for groceries for the three days, on top of our regular week. Roughly:
- A spiral ham for Christmas Day, about $45 at Kroger.
- Breakfast casserole for Christmas morning and cinnamon rolls, about $22.
- Sides, rolls and a relish tray for five, about $60.
- Christmas Eve chili and cornbread, Greg's job, about $25.
- Baking supplies, coffee, drinks and snacks for three days, about $90.
- Leftovers containers for everyone to take home, $18, because I always run out.
That leaves about $80 of slack for whatever I forgot, which is usually butter.
We did a big Thanksgiving for the five of us last month with a 12-pound turkey, so I am not doing turkey again. Nobody objected.
Gifts
We set a gift budget in October, $250 per kid, and Nate counts as a kid for this purpose. That is $750, down from the year we spent $1,100 and I felt bad about it into February. We also got rid of cable last month and dropped collision on Greg's 2014 F-150 this month, so between those two changes our monthly bills are about $140 lighter going into the new year. That money is not going to presents. It is the first thing in a while that is just staying put.
Josh turned 22 on December 2. He asked for tools for his first real apartment after graduation, which is a sentence that made Greg very happy.
Getting the rooms ready
The rooms are not really their rooms anymore. We cleared them out last spring and sold a lot of it in the garage sale. Emily and Nate will sleep in her old room on the full-size bed we kept. Josh gets his old room, which now has a bed, a dresser and nothing on the walls. He will not notice. Emily will notice and say something nice about it, which is what she does.
I put fresh towels in each room, a little basket with toiletries, and a printed note with the wifi password. Greg says that is a hotel move. I said that is the point.
What I expect the 26th to feel like
I expect the 26th will be odd. Two cars pulling out of the driveway by 10 a.m., a dishwasher full of mugs, and the tree still up with nobody under it. Greg is off that day, so I have already asked him to take me to a matinee in the afternoon, something loud with explosions. He agreed so fast I think he was dreading the quiet too.
It is a different kind of holiday. Shorter, a little more like hosting, a little more grown-up. I am trying to think of it as the first year they chose to come home instead of having to. That part, I like a lot.
