Holidays are one thing for a child and quite another for adults. For children, holidays are full of breaks from school, gatherings, decorations, wishes, and surprises. As an adult, I experience some of those things too, but they are muted, tempered by the weight of my hand in making it all happen.
For me, holidays are full of longing and laboring to make everyone have a happy holiday. If I shared this perspective with my family, I imagine some of them would not understand it or think it was me overcomplicating things. The gap in understanding can cause conflict and strain. They don't understand what I do. They think it just happens a certain way rather effortlessly.
And honestly, after working through so many layers of what my childhood was and was not, what my parents were and were not, what my husband is and is not, what my in-laws are and are not, I really can't say whether this is me complicating things, or a manifestation of a type of codependency, or part of being a mom. What do I want for Christmas? Each of my family members to experience a merry Christmas. I really think this is what I want most of all. All the rest of whatever happens or doesn't happen, lists and requests, food and events, flows from this overarching hope.
I also know that holidays for me are full of thinking about gifts intensely--what is arriving, not arriving, what color, size, kind? Where do I put it all? Do I have what I need to wrap it? Am I spending too much? Not enough? What can I get that is clever, different, not the same old thing? What does my family NEED. What will they wear or use? David thinks this is an unimaginative approach to gift gifting. But, he speaks from the romantic headspace of a 20 year-old young man who has never had a wife or child. I would love to be romantic about the holidays--such a perspect is a gift too that is long past my age, role, and stage in life.
My husband is largely oblivious of everyone's wishes and needs. It's not that he doesn't care--because he does. His mind just doesn't process the holidays or people in the same way mind does. He loves and experiences differently. Thus the gifts are much more an extension of my thoughts and experiences than his. All the same, this means that I do most, if not all, of the holiday thinking whether good or bad, necessary or overkill, enough or too much. If I try to involve him in all these details and gymjnastics, then I end up frustrated explaining my thinking or thinking over his thinking which is just MORE dang thinking in the end.
We can blame Charles Dickens or Washington Irving for this Christmas commercial build-up mess that is Christmas these days. We can poo-poo that it's much less about celebrating Christ and much more about us and our idealized precontrived expectations. We can drum up ways to scale back, give back, refocus, reprioritize, but in the end, there are still gifts under a tree that somehow need to happen.
Sometimes all of this spills out into gusts of emotions--mine, my children's my husband's. Sometimes it's the perfect awful storm. This build up of holiday expectations and preparations--the gifts, the relationships, the weight placed on a handful of days at the end of the year when light is scarce and the New Year is pressing at our door. It all becomes too too much, like that ginormous bucket of water towering over a water park--filling to the brim then there's nothing to do but brace myself for the weight of the deluge.
If I could take or leave what I appreciate about the holidays. Here's what I would take and keep. I love cooking good food for people, wrapping presents with care, the cheer of our Christmas lights and snowman family that pierce the darkness of cold and dreary winter days. I would hang up string after string of bright white lights and remember the year that I never did make that happen for my acutely sick father for his final Christmas with us here.
I would keep the mulled cider, the hot chocolate with marshmallows, the Hershy kisses, the dancing candles, the breathing coals of a mature fire, the delicate unexpected snowfalls that soften the dirt edges of life for a moment. The clean bright slate of such snow.
I would keep the Christmas morning gathering in our family room---one of the few times in the year when all of us sit down for an extended period of time, look at each other, and appreciate the value in being together, giving things to each other that we hope each will like or delight in.
I would leave the over-purchases that just happen along the way, the mismatched gift expectations, the trips to stores that do not have what I need or want, the traffic, the cognitive dissonance that comes when I try to find my place in the visible church, the fatigue of cooking so many dishes at once in a home that doesn't have a good layout for a communal kitchen, the tiny-let down that comes when all the gifts are unwrapped, we have eaten good food, and ask "what next?"
In the end, my holiday experience seems bound by the truth that I am a very practical person that wants others to be happy. Everything else comes out of this for better or worse.
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