The holiday season for our family begins at Halloween and passes through Thanksgiving and Christmas before culminating on New Year’s Eve. During that same timespan we also celebrate three birthdays, so it feels like two-and-a-half months of continual celebration, which is both wonderful and exhausting. 

We’ve accumulated a series of traditions that anchor these holiday celebrations: things we “always do,” things we “have to do,” lest the holidays not feel properly acknowledged. On the one hand, I love having family traditions that my children will recall with nostalgia: Halloween pumpkin carving and pizza at their grandparents’ house before trick-or-treating, the annual Thanksgiving football game and play, carrying our Christmas tree home from our neighbors’ farm, cookie decorating and beeswax candle-making, our enormous 25-candle Advent wreath (one candle for each day of December) and the gigantic smoke cloud it generates when extinguished for the final time. 

But I’ll be honest: Sometimes I feel like I’m a hostage to our traditions. The things we “always have to do” dance around on my cluttered mental to-do list throughout the holidays, torturing me with whispers of parental guilt: If you can’t fit me in, you’ll be letting down your kids. This will always be remembered as the year we DIDN’T (bake cookies/see the train display/have a Thanksgiving play). After ALL they’ve missed out on during the pandemic, can you really disappoint them like this? 

And that is why, a week before Halloween, I realized that we had to find a way to shoehorn a visit to the corn maze into a busy weekend. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.