The Magic of Elfing and Framily
Establishing holiday traditions, concocting joy from thin air, and redefining family.
Every year we pull out the Christmas decorations, some of them almost two decades old at this point, stored in an array of cardboard boxes and plastic totes in our attic.
I want to keep them for my children so they have those decorative items from their earliest memories, but many of them trigger far different emotions for me.
Sometimes by the time the tree is decorated and the garland arranged, I find myself a bit sad. Or retroactively angry. Rediscovering a beloved decoration I had to glue back together after someone smashed it in anger, or pulling out the ornament etched with the names of former friends who hurt us deeply.
Should I toss it? I place it back in the box every year.
Perhaps I keep them as a lesson; a reminder. When I see that item, or those names, the hurt rises back to the surface and I recall exactly what hard lesson I learned in those painful days.
All memories aren’t meant to be great ones.
Nostalgia, fantasy, and reality
Christmas has been spun a thousand different ways by a thousand different entities, using the season for whatever agenda suits their purpose.
We all have nostalgia for some Christmas of years past: perhaps fond memories of that shiny aluminum tree that rotated in the front bay window of your parent’s brick ranch in the suburbs or, conversely, the trip out to the woods to cut down a real pine tree to haul back to the family farmhouse.
A certain song, a recipe, a scent, that evokes warm memories of holidays gone by.
Then there’s the Christmas fantasy sold to us by Hollywood: that all families are one brief conversation away from reconciliation, that people ultimately want to be good and the holidays bring forth those behaviors, and that everyone in our immediate vicinity is celebrating the same holiday in the same way that we are and so our shared experience is universal.
We all know none of that is true.
The reality is much more difficult to put a bow on.
In reality, the holidays always include some level of negative emotions. We grieve for loved ones gone before us. We stress over the financial ramifications of additional groceries and gifting. We worry about hurt feelings, whether from a shortage of gifts, a forgotten Christmas card, or a cultural misstep.
And so, the older I get and the more obtuse American culture gets, the more that holiday magic is lost. Year by year, a little less sparkle.
But I persist in my traditions because I am building a family. A legacy.
Since being essentially rejected by my adoptive parents in young adulthood, and already finding myself a mother at 22, I was determined to build a real family for my children and grandchildren.
I wanted big, big Christmas gatherings, and Thanksgiving dinners so large we’d need card tables and lots of extra chairs. I wanted to build a network of people who put love first and foremost, who loved hard and without reservation, who loved without condition or expectation.
I didn’t just have children. I built a family. By establishing and continuing traditions, and refusing to give in to complacency and laziness, I crafted the culture of our family from the ground up.
Every holiday, every tradition, every moment invested in these choices has yielded returns I couldn’t begin to measure.
I didn’t have things passed down to me, either: no Grandma in the kitchen showing my kids how to make her cookies, no Grandpa out front directing everyone putting up decorations. I had to be everything about Christmas for my kids.
So I became an elf.
The making of magic
I lay awake one night in early December when they were very young. I had left my husband that year after one too many violent incidents. In a small rental house in a pretty rough part of town, I became even more determined to continue to build these family traditions — to keep the magic of the holidays alive for my children during an otherwise turbulent year, providing some consistency and routine.
As they slept, I dug through my meager possessions, racking my brain. I had a pack of printer paper, scissors, tape, white thread, and an extra string of Christmas lights.
I spent three hours that night cutting out dozens and dozens of paper snowflakes of all shapes and sizes and taping them to various lengths of white thread.
I then quietly picked up a dining room chair and placed it in the hallway, climbed atop it, and taped each one of the snowflakes onto the ceiling, going down the entire length from my bedroom to the living room.
I then zigzagged the lights on the ceiling throughout the snowflakes.
As a final touch, a small note with a hand-drawn candy cane and, in swirly cute letters, “You’ve been elfed!” taped to the light switch.
I went to my room. Not to sleep, but to hide the scissors and tape and to change my clothes for work. My alarm went off while I was dressing, and the kids began to stir. I hurried to pull on my pants and opened my door so I could see their faces as they emerged from their rooms.
The glimmer in their eyes, the open-mouthed stares while craning their heads back, and the sheer look of awe, as they stumbled sleepily from their rooms and looked up at the now twinkling and ‘snowing’ ceiling, gave me such a feeling of delight it’s hard to describe.
A tradition was born that lasted many years. At some point each December, sometimes not until mere days before Christmas, the house would be elfed. Always in the same way: paper snowflakes and lights making a boring hallway a magical experience.
As the kids aged, obviously they were aware no magical creature from the North Pole was coming in and doing this, but they kept being delighted.
We don’t often get super clear signs that we are on the right track or doing something right as parents, but I had one such moment when I returned home from a business meeting on a cold December evening several years ago.
I walked in and couldn’t even take off my coat before my kids, then 11, 9, and 7, eagerly greeted me at the door and steered me toward the dining room.
I looked up and gasped, and my eyes instantly flooded with tears.
I’d been elfed.
An intergenerational family tradition had officially been born.
Paper snowflakes in all shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling. Woven throughout were paper chains and strings of Christmas lights.
It was sheer magic.
And when I turned to look at them, their expectant faces looked so much like that first Christmas: eyes wide, smiling from ear to ear, the glow of holiday magic radiating from them.
Turns out they delighted just as much in doing the elfing as in being elfed.
Our framily
Another theme of my kids’ Christmases has been that there have been a variety of friends who celebrated with us throughout the years. When you don’t have a real traditional family to “go home” to, you make your own family. We have friends that are so close to us that they’re more accurately called ‘framily.’
These are people who have watched our kids grow up and whose quiet, enduring presence is a reassuring reminder that there are people who choose us, people who love and care about us just the way we are, and that we are never alone.
Ultimately, we keep our circle small. We prioritize time with our children over time at social events out and about.
Even before Covid, I much preferred time at home during the holidays than being out on cold, dark December nights. You can’t beat cozying up to a warm fire with a good book or a great holiday movie with the people you love.
In the bottom of our box of Christmas decorations, there are ornaments personalized with the names of people who hurt us, decorations with jagged edges from someone’s angry outburst, and even others that are remnants of years I’d just rather not remember.
I don’t need to display them, but I’m not ready to toss them just yet. Having the annual reminder of how far we’ve come and how arduous the journey keeps me grounded and grateful for the loved ones we still have who have stuck around through thick and thin and whose enduring love and acceptance wrap us in warmth even on the coldest night.
Growing older means savoring those moments of childlike innocence as our children fall asleep on our laps while watching beloved holiday films and also sitting quietly with myriad complex emotions that fill the same space.
The magic isn’t gone but it’s changed; it’s more faceted. In a moment we can feel both joy and pain, nostalgic wistfulness and romantic idealism, regret and hope.
With one foot in the past, one in the present, and our eyes fixed on the future, we humm the familiar old carols as we continue to weave the stories of who we are for our children, the stories they’ll tell to their children and grandchildren during Christmas seasons long after we’re gone.
I have that big, big family now. We have years of traditions under our belt, those that we undergird and strengthen every year we repeat them.
I love that, despite it all, at the end of every passing year, we create traditions, experiences, and moments that are weaving the fabric of my family’s memories. Injecting magic into their lives, magic that will grow and reproduce in the lives of their respective families, well that’s like achieving just a bit of immortality.
Or maybe, just a bit of real elf magic.
My name is Melissa Corrigan, and I’m a freelance writer/thought sharer/philosopher in coastal Virginia. I am a mom, a wife, a veteran, and so much more. I deeply enjoy sharing my thoughts and receiving feedback that sparks genuine, respectful conversation.
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