And so we enter the Christmas season, which this year promises to be unlike any Christmas we’ve shared. This is the last Christmas that L will still be living at home. It certainly won’t be the last Christmas we spend together, but it will most likely (excluding any unforeseen contingencies) be the last Christmas that she spends with us where the weeks leading up and the weeks trailing off see her still in her lovely room. “I guess I’ll head back now,” will be the phrase we’re dreading next year.

Last year, apparently, was a last for us — at least for a while. I am no longer in charge of the tree: this year, the Boy insisted on taking care of the tree. He unloaded it yesterday afternoon, suspended it under the deck to allow the branches to relax a bit, and carried into the house by himself — irritated that I wanted a picture as he did it.

“You’re like the paparazzi!” he declared.

This reticence to having his picture taken has been building, and it’s positively a thing now. L has gradually disappeared from the majority of the entries because of similar reasons. It’s understandable: teens are so very self-conscious of everything they do, of how everyone might look at them. I remember those anxieties myself. I would have felt even more aware of myself during this time of year: nothing stands out like not celebrating Christmas. At least when you’re the one not celebrating it. Like so many “distinctives” in our little sect, that one is more wide spread than I would have suspected as a seventh grader.

He did allow me to snap a shot of him putting the first ornament on the tree.

And as we were putting lights on the house, there was not much he could do to protest.

I don’t have nearly the number of photos from my own childhood as my children have of theirs. The reason, of course, is simple: digital is cheaper. We currently have 135,184 pictures in our Lightroom library, and that’s including scanned pictures back through the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties — well before the masses went digital. There was certainly something about the old film days that’s lacking now: that wait. You take a shot and you think you have a really great shot, but you’re not sure. So you send the pictures off for development (or do it yourself — I’m fortunate to have had a little darkroom for a few years), and there’s that excitement going through the pictures (or watching the developer bring the image out of nothing).

I still get that a little with digital, though. Snap a picture and a series of possible edits in Lightroom start running through my head. I’m no longer wondering if I got the shot, though. And that delayed gratification — it’s gone for good.

Finally, we get everything up and L asks, “Why is are the lights on the tree blue at the top and white at the bottom?” Because, to return to the opening thoughts, this Christmas will not be like others. Nana and Papa have been gone for years now: this will be our sixth Christmas without Nana and our fourth without Papa, true, but it still feels wrong.

It will also be our first Christmas without a long-anticipated Christmas party. Almost everyone we usually spend Christmas with decided to go back to Poland for this Christmas. (That’s why we all got together on Thanksgiving: the only difference was the food and the lack of carols, though everyone made up for it singing everything else they could think of.) I can’t blame them: Christmas in Poland is magical in a lot of ways. But it means things will be different around here.

Quieter, for one.

That’s almost always a good thing.