A 9-foot nutcracker. Magic crystals that light up a fireplace with green and purple flames. Glass-glitter pinecones so sharp, they have to be handled with protective gear.

These are just some of the decorations that Christmas enthusiasts are using to show their holiday cheer in an otherwise dreary year. Dorinda Medley, a former star of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City, is known for “making it nice,” especially the exuberant Christmas displays she installs each year at Blue Stone Manor, her home in the Berkshires. But she’s going extra-big this holiday season — literally, if that giant nutcracker she bought is any indication. “When I pressed the button, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ But now it’s on the American Express, paid for, and I’m happy for it,” Medley says.

Being happy for it, for small pockets of merriment in a time when everything seems not very merry, is adding up to big business for purveyors of Christmas decor, who are selling holiday cheer at a fast clip. “I’ve got to put in the effort this year,” Medley says of her big spending, “because it would be easy just to fall into the doldrums of 2020 and say forget it. But I think that, at the end of the day, people need to feel hopeful.”

Medley is not alone. In this year of diminished holiday celebrations, with many skipping the holidays entirely and others doing their best to adjust traditions to fit the safety measures called for by the Covid-19 pandemic, Christmas enthusiasts are choosing to redirect energy they would usually spend on parties, meals, and frantic shopping trips to putting up over-the-top decorations and light displays.

Celebrants are expressing holiday cheer inside as well, through old-fashioned Yuletide activities like gingerbread-house building and garland-stringing as people seek out what Medley describes as a Norman Rockwell-esque Christmas. “I want to evoke that feeling of home — because we’ve all been home,” she says. (It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Christmas crafts are highly, highly Instagrammable.)

It’s a scene that is playing out across the country. “Over the last two months, we’ve seen a 45 percent increase in holiday lighting over the same time frame last year, and a 42 percent increase with wreaths and garland,” says Andrew Wolf, a holiday merchant at Ace Hardware. And John DeCosmo, president of Ulta-Lit Tree Company, says, “Light sets sales are up, outdoor decor sales are up, and artificial Christmas tree sales are up, so yes, we are seeing it. Our own sales online are up over 30 percent this year.”

Caroline Moss, an author and host of the podcast Gee Thanks Just Bought It, is doing an outdoor lights display for the first time and saw no reason to wait until after Thanksgiving to illuminate her home. “I put up an outdoor tree and outdoor lights on November 2,” she confesses. Moss, who relocated to Los Angeles this year with her husband Dan, was concerned about what her new neighbors might think, though she needn’t have worried. “I was very nervous because I didn’t want to be seen as the crazy new neighbors. I texted my next-door neighbor, and she was like, ‘Oh, we’re doing it too.’”

According to DeCosmo, the day after Thanksgiving is typically the most popular day of the year for Christmas decorating. But this year, people like Moss got an early start, perhaps wanting to wear their holiday cheer on their lawns. Bronson van Wyck, a decorator who services a high-end clientele, saw a noted increase in business — especially among early birds. “We would typically do somewhere between six to 10 homes for Christmas, and we would probably have booked them by about [mid-November],” he says. “This year we had a dozen bookings before Labor Day.”

Van Wyck is capitalizing in another way: For $475, his website offers something called a “Sugar and Spice, Sensory Delights Package” featuring “(1) Evergreen, cedar and juniper wreath adorned with dried citrus, cinnamon stick and faux berries hand-crafted by genuine Van Wyck Elves,” a full-color smart LED light bulb from GE, and a tube of those magic crystals for tossing in the fire (Amazon retail price: $15.26). Van Wyck isn’t the only one trotting out elves. On the new Netflix show Holiday Home Makeover with Mr. Christmas, interior designer Benjamin Bradley, the titular Mr. Christmas, and his team (yes, of elves) gives four families holiday home makeovers that feature hand-flocked trees, Della Robbia-style wreaths, lucite diamonds, hanging lanterns, and luminescent deer. Mr. Christmas, in his own words, goes “Christmas balls to the walls.”

Preston Davis, the editor of Keep it Chic, is another newcomer to festive outdoor holiday displays. “I have never put lights outside or in windows and I plan to do that this year! I think it’s important to show that we are here, we’re celebrating,” Davis says. 

In holiday seasons past, Davis hosted a series of luncheons to visit with old friends returning home for the holidays. But with travel and large gatherings off the table, Davis is thinking about building a gingerbread house and making old-fashioned popcorn garland with her adult daughters, ages 20 and 25 — provided they’re able to safely travel home. “I plan on really ramping up, the tree with the popcorn strings and all that stuff. I really want to go all out,” she says.

She’s also hoping her kids will want in on the fun. “I want them to help decorate and do some of those traditions, gingerbread houses and cookies. Maybe I’ll even get them to produce sugar cubes for Santa. Who knows?!” She views these hands-on activities as a way to break her habit of multitasking — which, she acknowledges, “takes a lot of value away from the time I spend with my family.”

It’s no surprise that in this socially distant year, with touch and physical proximity largely off-limits, people are finding creative visual and aural ways to connect with others. Springtime’s nightly clapping and cheering for first responders beget the summer’s illegal fireworks shows, which gave way to giant skeletons come Halloween. Now, at Yuletide, the creative means have become literal, with people taking up those highly Instagrammable crafting projects.

In keeping with the nostalgic tone of this Christmas, Elizabeth Schulte of Salem, Oregon, is stepping up her garland-making, using dried fruits like oranges and apples alongside more traditional popcorn and cranberries. The dried apples are the literal fruits of illicit labor; she engaged in a practice called scrumping to obtain them. “It means, um, liberating apples that are maybe not necessarily legally yours, from a place where there’s no one really necessarily guarding them,” Schulte says. To atone for the scrumping, she’s also considering adopting another historic holiday activity: wassailing. “It’s where they would go around and sing Christmas songs to the orchard” to encourage the trees to grow more apples, she says. “Considering how we have just been robbing apples all over the state, maybe we should go and give them some encouragement.”

Schulte is incorporating nostalgia in another way. “I’m going to use some strange glitter on one of the garlands, I think maybe on the pine cones.” Strange glitter? Schulte explains that before World War II, glitter was made mostly from ground glass out of Germany, and she wanted the real deal. “It’s quite annoying to find, I found some online,” she says.

The German ground-glass glitter presented another problem, albeit one with a very 2020 solution. “I’m low-key concerned that I’m going to get ground glass into my lungs and eyes,” Schulte says. “I think in order to safely use it, I have to wear a mask.”

The Dyson fan arrived the same night I canceled a date because it was just too hot.

Everyone was hot, not just me, and I should have gone on the date. Margaritas and tacos with a 26-year-old musician is exactly the thing to do when it’s 90+ degrees and 10,000% humidity in New York City. 

But I had been in the studio where I record my podcast, where the 20-something-year-old members of the production team insist on turning off the air conditioner for sound-quality purposes despite my pleas every week to keep it running: “The mics don’t pick up the AC, I promise. Please leave it on. I’m 42, and I’m hot.”

In response, they completely ignore me. They simply don’t get it, and in fairness, they have no reason to.

It’s possible that you, reading this, also simply don’t get it, and that’s okay, because I can explain: I am perimenopausal. Perimenopause means “around menopause” — menopause being the cessation of menstruation — and for most women, it begins in their 40s, though for some it starts earlier.

If that sounds vague and slightly menacing to you, well, yeah. It’s a vague thing. It doesn’t have a distinct starting point, and there are many symptoms, and you may suffer from some of them, or you may not, and cumulatively that lack of clarity translates for a lot of us to, “No one knows anything, just suffer quietly and possibly pump some hormones into your body.” 

There are many ways the medical community has failed to serve women’s health needs, and a lack of information and treatment options around perimenopause is high on the list. One of the distinct symptoms of perimenopause, the one that most of us — according to Johns Hopkins, nearly 75% of women — endure are hot flashes. In my case, hot flashes began as night sweats in the last year of my 30s. I had always been a cold sleeper, a burrower, and all of a sudden I was waking up in a puddle.

“Ah well, it’s come for me,” I’d think, because the timing of those night sweats, always a day or two before my period arrived, was undeniably linked to my reproductive cycle. My changing reproductive cycle. The Mayo Clinic refers to perimenopause as a “progression toward menopause” and wow, doesn’t that evoke thoughts of the slow march toward death for you? It sure does for me!

I don’t generally lament getting older; I look younger than I am, and I date even younger than that. I’m rarely called ma’am, despite being well into ma’am territory. But there’s something about the physicality of the sweat that deposits a heavy pit in my stomach, that makes me feel awful, not just because I’m sticky and hot but because I am inescapably confronted with the reality of my advancing age. Because perimenopause, of course, also signals the beginning of the end of fertility.

Most people assume that because I don’t have children, I don’t like children. In fact, I quite like children, though there are a great many children I do not like, as is true of adults, and of dogs, too. I would have liked to have children of my own, but it simply did not happen for me; that is both a disappointment and a gift, in its way. I live a life relatively unencumbered by others, and there is a great deal of freedom in that.

When people ask — and oh boy do they ever ask! — about why I don’t have children, how I feel about it, if I plan to adopt, or take the turkey-baster approach to going it alone now that I am divorced, they get a canned answer. (You read a version of it, just now, “I would have liked to have children of my own, but it simply did not happen for me.”) I imagine that a great many other childless, or childfree, or whatever term best suits their attitude about the situation, women have canned answers at the ready as well.

Disappointment aside, I feel generally confident that not having children is the right thing for me. That in and of itself is possibly the biggest disappointment of all — I have failed myself. I have not turned out to be the woman I thought I’d be, or who I wanted to be. But then also there is this: My life is far (far, far!) more fun and interesting than I imagined it would be when I thought, perhaps vaguely, about what adulthood would look like. It’s a life of creative work, and one filled with many friends, a handful of whom are like family to me in that we spend holidays together and will care for each other as we age. There is no small amount of wine involved.

Many people probably look at my life and think, “Oh grow up,” and I get that, I really do. The thing is … I did grow up. And then I grew out of growing up. Without someone to put dinner on the table for every night, why should I have to put dinner on the table every night? Why shouldn’t I head downstairs to my local joint with my laptop and have a few (too many, okay) glasses of wine while I respond to the last of the day’s emails? Why not date men a decade and a half younger than me? 

I like to think that I’m at peace with all of this, but the truth is that sometimes the sweat feels like a warning, like my body is signaling to me in the least subtle way “GIRL THE TIME TO PANIC IS NOW!!! WHO WILL CARE FOR YOU WHEN YOU ARE ANCIENT???”

But when I start to panic, when I imagine all the criticisms people make of me behind my back, I draw a cool bath, and climb in to splish and splash while catching up on my Bravo stories. I remind myself that I probably could not do this if I had kids; that I probably wouldn’t if I still had a husband. And that despite being single and childless at age 42, somehow there will be people to care for me when I am ancient.

There’s a scene in Real Housewives of New York that shows Carole Radziwill’s bedroom; the Dyson fan sits, unobtrusively, elegantly even, on one of her bedside tables. When I noticed it, because I notice everything, I recall thinking “Oh, that’s her menopause fan.” There was no judgment in that thought; it was a matter-of-fact observation borne of my immediate understanding of its meaning in the room of a 50-something-year-old woman. 

Days before New York was to be walloped with a heatwave that would leave the city feeling like it was 107°, the window-unit air conditioner was already no longer enough to allow me to sleep comfortably, and I remembered Carole. Her same Dyson fan went on sale for $190, discounted from its usual price of $272, and so I took the plunge and ordered my own. I woke up the morning after the canceled date, alone, and thanks to the fan helping to circulate the cold air from the window unit, my bedroom was like an icebox. I felt elated. My fan, my beloved fan, would not only save my sleep, she would save my dating life.

I have named her Flo.

Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert, advice columnist and host of the podcast Ask a Clean Person. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times.