The holidays are here and every year it feels like our holiday traditions feel more and more bittersweet. For parents of high schoolers and college kids, gone are the days of Santa visits and Elf on The Shelf shenanigans. These days, holiday hustle and bustle is about quiet nights by the fire waiting on your teens to come home from a gift exchange with their friends and slipping a gas card into their stockings.
When your teen son comes downstairs on Christmas morning wearing a hoodie and sporting a five o’clock shadow, it’s hard not to blink back tears when you think of his three-year-old red rosy cheeks wearing Rudolph footie pajamas.
Taylor Swift Releases a New Christmas Video
That’s why Taylor Swift’s new Christmas video is hitting parents right in the feels. The video for her new track, “Christmas Tree Farm,” opens with Swift in a car, heading home for the holidays. In black and white footage, she somberly sings about stress, holiday traffic, and her overscheduled celebrity life.
But then the tempo shifts and Swift slaps us with candy cane nostalgia: we are treated to home videos of Swift as toddler, enjoying the simple pleasures of winter and Christmas fun.
And when you realize that Swift is singing about the special memories she had as a child with her parents? Spoiler alert: you are going to need an entire box of tissues.
From toddling around a Christmas tree farm to climbing snow piles in a head to toe pink snowsuit, Swift reminds us that no matter where our kids go in life, we will always see them as the little ones who drank in the magic of the holidays.
In the mad dash to fill out FAFSA forms and college applications, we know that the time with all of our teens under one roof is slipping away like sand in our hands.
As we watch them succeed on the gridiron or on the bright white way, we get a glimpse of the big life they are about to embark on and it’s a bittersweet sleigh ride of emotion. And though we’ve raised them to leave us, we also pray that they remember the little things we did to make their childhoods special, particularly at the holidays.
Swift’s video reminds us kids will always remember that there’s no place like our homes on Christmas morning, no matter how far they’ve gone in their careers.
In a world where teens are bombarded with Instagram influencers with over the top holiday celebrations, Swift’s sweet video shows that less truly is more. The video footage of 8-year-old Swift with bed head running toward her family’s Christmas morning as she sings, “Sweet dreams of holly and ribbon, mistakes are forgiven and everything is icy and blue,” reminds us that kids, no matter what their age, yearn for the simple pleasures of their childhoods.
And they know that we will always be their safe place to land at the holidays.
So, when your teen (and his laundry) yell “I’m home!” we won’t blame you if you have a cup of hot cocoa in his favorite Santa mug waiting.
As you are scouring the internet for impossible to find AirPods, take a break and have a snow ball fight with your teen. Because I can guarantee you that footage of those ear buds won’t be what winds up in your superstar celebrity teen’s Christmas video.
Though the days of believing in Santa are behind us and, for many of us, the joys of the season have shifted to include our teens’ significant others and extended family parties, we won’t judge you if you stop this season to reminisce about the late nights of building complicated toys on Christmas Eve and the sweet sounds of first graders singing “Silent Night.” Because just like Swift croons, “I close my eyes and I’m somewhere else, just like magic.”
Happy Holidays to us, Parents. We’ve done good.
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