Do you remember the thrill it was to start the holiday season with bright lights strung up everywhere, stores playing festive music, thoughts of presents, and the magic this time of year brought? Somehow adulthood comes and those strung up lights are tied in knots along with your stomach when the festive music starts months too soon and you suddenly dread the coming season. The thoughts of presents turn into agony with wonders of what to give, will they like it, and can I afford it? The magic disappears when you shop online to simplify shopping, isolate yourself in your home to avoid crowds, and try in every way to avoid endless holiday gatherings.
The holidays should be a time of joy, yet for so many it is anything but merry and bright. It can be a time that brings stress, anxiety, and depression. All month we will be looking at ways to cope with the holidays and what you can do to make them a little bit brighter.
First Things First: Not Perfect is Perfectly OK
It is ok that your house is not decorated like a magazine cover, your holiday tree has ornaments made with paper, your profile picture isn’t a family dressed in coordinating outfits, or that you don’t have the time to bake and decorate the platefuls of immaculate holiday cookies you see on social media. We spend so much time worrying about how we compare to others that we forget that we only need to worry about how we see ourselves.
One Christmas, I had a particularly tough time. I was a single parent in grad school, working full time, taking care of my sick elderly mother, and had waited to do my shopping for when my school was on break. And as luck would have it, I ended up with a bad case of the flu just a couple of weeks before the holiday. I laid on the couch sick for days. When I was finally able to move, it was the day before Christmas and I didn’t have any presents, no holiday food, nothing to offer my children for Christmas morning. On Christmas eve I hustled around trying to grab whatever I could find
, hoping to salvage the holiday. Early the next morning, my kids opened presents of construction paper, markers, and glue. We spent the day cutting, gluing, and creating things from paper, baking cookies, and laughing. I had spent so much time feeling guilty that I didn’t “do better”, feeling like I let them down, that I was a horrible mother, and that I ruined Christmas. When in fact, no one cared that they didn’t get the latest toys or the coolest gear. Everyone was happy because we were together, that I wasn’t sick any longer, and that we were able to spend quality time as a family.
Now granted, that isn’t every holiday and I have faced many disappointing glances and forced smiles over failed gifts. But what that holiday season taught me is that sometimes just doing what you can in that moment is enough and the most important thing that we can do for ourselves is allow ourselves some forgiveness. We don’t have to always be perfect for our children, for social media, the school parent group, the workplace, or for ourselves. We need to accept that sometimes we are just doing the best we can and that is perfectly ok.
Do you remember a time when things didn’t go perfectly, and it turned out better than you could have imagined?
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