Christmas Feels Different Now

Christmas comes back every year even when I no longer wait for it the way I used to. The date does not change and the calendar insists but something else has. My house no longer has those paper stars that once hung from the ceiling. There are no lights tangled around the pillars. No planning about where to place them. The walls look the same as any other night, and no one feels the need to change that.

Plum cake has not disappeared, only the feeling that once came with it has. Earlier one cake was never enough. There would be boxes on the table, slices cut generously, arguments about who finished the last piece. Now there is just one slice, and it does not matter much. Because the meaning it held earlier is gone.

Going out is always an option. Cafes are open, streets are lit, music plays somewhere. But that kind of celebration feels external, like borrowing someone else’s mood for a few hours. It fills time but not space. It does not replace how celebration once happened at home without a plan.

As a child Christmas meant time. Half yearly exams ending meant freedom. Freedom to wake up late, to help put up lights, to feel the days move more slowly than the rest of the year. The excitement did not come from the festival alone but from the space it created in life. Everything slowed down and that slowing itself felt like joy.

This does not feel like loss in a dramatic way. It feels more like recognition. The understanding that certain kinds of excitement belong to a version of us that no longer exists. It is not a matter of something going wrong. Growing up reshapes what matters and how deeply it can be felt.

Perhaps this is what adulthood does. It does not take festivals away instead it moves them into the corners of memory, where they survive in a smell that reminds you of another year, in a slice of cake that tastes of times past, in the small things that mark the passing of years. The celebration is still there but it belongs to a different kind of attention and a different kind of self.

Christmas is still here. Just not the way it once was. And maybe that is not sadness. Maybe it is simply time doing what time always does, teaching us that some joys are meant to be outgrown.