The Young And The Restless | Placing star is the highest honour

I don’t know how, in just one year, so much can change, but it does.

And Christmases from one year to the next are the perfect bookends to recognise such patterns.

For starters, we’ve never committed the cardinal sin of putting up our Christmas tree before December until this year.

But we found a window on Sunday night and surmised, looking at the upcoming week’s calendar, that we’d find no time to do it, especially on our traditional tree-putting-up day (December 1) with school, work and a Christmas party that night.

There was that, and the fact I’d wrapped a bunch of presents a few days earlier and sat them all on top of a blanket box in my bedroom.

When I stripped my bed on Sunday, I didn’t consider that I’d need to open said box laden with gifts to get fresh sheets out.

Instead of shifting all the presents off it and then back onto it, I wanted the tree up so time-poor I could dump them straight under it and didn’t have to double-handle present-shifting. Yes, that’s how little spare time I feel I have in my life right now.

So I called out to my boys, trying to invoke excitement in the task ahead: “Boys! Let’s put up the Christmas tree!”

Two out of the three of them — despite being forewarned we’d be engaging in this activity that night — found the timing inconvenient to their own schedules.

There are, of course, PlayStation games to finish.

And there is, of course, sleep to be had for the one who had to work six hours across two days and is now “so tired”.

Bless them.

The third and youngest conveniently disappears for the part where we have to sort the colour-coded tree branches and build the tree, reappearing just in time to dress it.

As we decorated together, pulling out Santa hats and festive light necklaces from the storage box to wear while we did so, nothing much else had changed from when we first started sharing this tradition.

Until my 16-year-old showed his age and ordered Google Nest to play Christmas hip-hop songs.

When our virtual assistant couldn’t retrieve such a genre and started playing explicit Kevin Bloody Wilson “carols” instead, I had to intervene to preserve what innocence remained in my 13-year-old’s ears.

(High school next year — that battle is about to be lost, I know, but please, just one more Christmas without knowing certain words exist in the dictionary of Aussie slang!).

And speaking of inappropriate words, my 14- and 16-year-olds then proceeded to rearrange the “peace, joy, love” letter blocks into the most inappropriate arrangements they could make with the letters available to them — let your mind run wild.

I mean, building the tree might have become a chore to them, but at least they’re finding a new kind of joy in the task of decorating, right?

Now, if you have multiple children and can remember from year to year whose turn it is to put the star on top of the tree without some written record or photographic evidence to refer to, I take my hat off to you.

My brain does not have the capacity for that, so I keep a little note inside the box in which the star gets stored for 11 months of the year.

Sure, it feels like we only packed it up a couple of months ago, but I still cannot remember without this written reminder.

And despite not taking their tree-putting-up task so seriously anymore, they all still care a little bit too passionately about not missing their turn to place the finishing touch.

I’m not sure if that’s plain competitiveness that I don’t personally understand between three brothers born across three years or if they still get a kick out of being “the chosen one” tasked with the highest of honours.

They might be too old to believe in certain things these days. They might also have had a reality check when I refused their request to invite an elf back into our lives just for a laugh this year unless they start going to bed before me again.

The way they have fun with all of this may be very different to how it used to be, but there is still magic in this time of year no matter how much has changed.