The first snowfall hitting Waterloo, Starbucks launching their Holiday drinks and decorations springing up around the city left, right and center: these are the signals of the beginning of the most wonderful time of year – the holiday season!
As a huge fan of the holiday season, I’ve already indulged in the holiday cheer, spending an entire paycheck on decorations to create a festive and cozy apartment. Getting ready for Christmas always reminds me of growing up in the early 2000s and makes me look forward to all of the fun activities to do around the holidays. I long for Christmas to be like the ones of my childhood, and I will happily admit that I’m always nostalgic for a Christmas like the early 00s.
My fondest memories of the holiday seasons were in elementary school. I remember doing holiday crafts, singing songs and writing letters to Santa in the weeks leading up to the winter break. I felt that the school was so festive, sprawling with holiday decorations. Recess was so much fun since students were building snow forts, snowmen and sneakily having a snowball fight away from the teachers. There were assemblies dedicated to singing Christmas carols and class parties where we watched a movie, feasted on baked goods, danced and sang!
Then there was tobogganing. The number of hours I spent dragging my sled up the hill over and over again was a lot but so worth it! It was so much fun to speed down the hill on crazy carpets and inner tubes over a ramp you built with your siblings or friends and then go back up to the top to do it all over again. It felt like life didn’t exist in those moments, that time escaped itself, because before you knew it, it was starting to get dark and the air got colder, so you packed up your sleds and made hot chocolate when you got home to warm yourself up.
And I can’t forget about planning for Christmas around the house! I remember helping my mom lug out the boxes of decorations and finding special places for all of them to go. Then my family would go out to cut down a Christmas tree and we’d spend the evening by the fire covering it in hand-made ornaments. We’d run to see the outside Christmas lights turn on and drive around the neighbourhood looking at other people’s Christmas lights. I loved snuggling in on Christmas Eve and watching claymation movies such as Rudolph, the Rednosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus is Coming to Town and other classics such as Home Alone, The Grinch and Christmas Vacation. It was also fun to set a “trap” for Santa with your siblings and lay anxiously in bed to hear any sound that would disturb the peaceful silence of Christmas Eve.
These are the memories I have surrounding Christmas that make me nostalgic for the past. Christmas in the early 2000s felt like a surreal fever dream, and I’m envious that I will never fully get to experience it again from the perspective of an innocent child.