Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Christmas 2013: The Christmas of Good Enough*

(*With apologies to my friend Elizabeth, who inspired the name and from whom I might have stolen it)

I used to love Christmas.  I would be preparing for weeks.  Baking, wrapping, singing, watching movies, snuggling, lighting fires, shopping, visiting friends, hosting parties, going to concerts.  It was usually 6 weeks of non-stop fun and festivity.

And then my husband died.  And last year I went through the motions because everyone told me I had to for Leah's sake.  And I was miserable.  And I hated every single minute of it.  And the whole family was at each other's throats, emotions ran high, it was a mess.

And this year, I was determined I was not going to go through that.  Absolutely not.  I didn't know how things were going to change, but I knew that they had to.  When I was a little girl, my favorite books were the Sweet Pickles series, about different animals corresponding to the letters of the alphabet.  One of my all time favorites was the book Rest, Rabbit, Rest. Oh sure, my dad made the best voices when he read us Yakkity Yak Yak and I always got the shivers when Nasty Nightingale or Accusing Alligator got mean with everyone.  But Responsible Rabbit, there was an animal you could relate to.  Rabbit had schedules for everything.  He had charts and clocks and he was so busy and everything was regimented from the time he spent working at the bank to the precise number of minutes that he spent playing music for his flowers.  But Rabbit never rests.  He just keeps going and going until eventually his friends have to trick him into resting before he has a total collapse.

I have turned into Rabbit.  There is so much going on all the time that I narrowly avoid mishaps and mistakes, and I'm missing out on my child's childhood.  I have housework and schoolwork and pre-school pick up and drop off and gymnastics and dance and playdates and board meetings and choir practice and church stuff and and and... Around October, the calendar on my iPad gave up displaying my appointments, instead listing "And 5 more" on the blocks.  And I started to realize that my "have to" list was eating up my time so I could ignore the pain I was in and also so I could just get through my days.

We ran around like crazy over Thanksgiving.  And I just wanted to relax.  I hated it.  I hated the constant car rides up 95, the traffic, the "have to's" and the "shoulds" and the "can'ts".  I was so behind on schoolwork I spent most of Thanksgiving week writing a paper and missing out on my father's visit.  I shuffled my daughter off to relatives and spent the week in a deep funk. And I looked ahead to Christmas and the calendar and I knew I had to finish school and sing in a concert and go to a couple of concerts and host the annual 3 Kings party and do all the things associated with Christmas, and I get very very depressed and I just thought, "I really, really do not want to do this."  I recently spent two hours sobbing hysterically to a volunteer at the suicide prevention crisis line, and like Responsible Rabbit's friends, the end game of that conversation was "You need to start taking care of yourself.  You need to quit worrying about everyone else's reactions to you and you need to assert your need to be heard and you need to do things that help you care for yourself."

Yet I was already hearing, "You have to do Christmas for Leah.  You have to."  And so I thought to myself, "I may have to have Christmas for Leah, but that doesn't mean Leah can't decide what we do for Christmas."  And so this year, I decided to let Leah be in charge of Christmas.

It has been interesting.  For the first 2 weeks, I was consumed with schoolwork.  I missed the annual concert at Wolf Trap.  I considered going up until 2pm that day, but finally I just felt I had to skip it and do my work.  On the plus side, I did get my Christmas shopping done early, and because Leah was with Melissa, everything was wrapped and hidden before she got home, so I haven't had to worry about that.  Her first 4 Christmases, I bought out every toy in the world, freaked out about the cost, wrapped for days, it was a scene.  This year, I used gift cards and coupons everywhere I went, narrowed my list considerably, and I feel very good about it.  Last weekend, I missed my friends Paul and Kris's annual holiday get-together, which I LOVE and feel bad about missing.  But the world didn't end.  I attended a choir board meeting that had me just beside myself, and then I performed in the concert on Sunday and I realized that what mattered was adding my voice to 60+ others and making 450 people in an auditorium excited to hear singing and music.  I had the most fun at this concert I think than I've had in any concert I've sung.  And that's saying something.  I seriously screwed up twice.  Once I don't think was all that noticeable, but the other time I was singing my own thing in my own time.  Oh well.  C'est la vie.

We did a 2 session course at Hospice on "Coping with the Holidays", which allowed us to do some crafts and talk about the holidays and what we used to do. The main lessons were "start a new ritual" and "create new traditions".  I liked our old traditions.  I loved sneaking out of the house on Christmas night and getting McD's at the drivethrough in my PJ's.  I liked riding around looking at lights every night while sipping cocoa.  I loved watching Love Actually till I wanted to puke.  I didn't want anything to change.  But it did change.  And so I have to accept that.  I don't have to like it, but I do have to accept it.

I've spent a good part of this holiday season chatting with friends on line, starting a new evening posting of George Clooney pictures, and sewing.  I am finally learning to sew, which requires a post of its own.  But I also let Leah dictate what holiday things we are going to do.  So once in a while she asks if we can go look at lights, and we do.  We watched a couple of Christmas movies together, not necessarily at night.  Monday night we volunteered at the local soup kitchen, serving a meal to needy and homeless members of our community.  It was quite an awesome experience and I think Leah learned a great deal from it.  She cried because I wouldn't let her eat a cookie until all the patrons of the community had enough, and I explained to her about how the people in the room were hungry and didn't have regular meals and she had to sit and consider that.  It made quite an impact on her to see babies and young children coming in for a meal.  I was glad to do it and I was glad to have her do it as well.

Once we were done doing good, it was tree time, and the major thing I relinquished control over to her of was the tree.

For a while, I thought we weren't going to get a tree.  Our friends Greg and Allison very kindly offered us that we could either go with them to the farm to get one from their CSA or else we could go get one ourselves when we had time. I opted that we would get one ourselves as I always put mine up late and they were going earlier in the month.  I never made it out to the farm and Leah never asked.  She occasionally would see a little potted tree in the supermarket and I'd think, "OK this is the tree!" but it never was.  This week, the last full week before Christmas, was the week I had in mind that we'd do one special thing every day.  Yesterday was "Tree Day" and we were going to go get our tree and pick up a new stand.  But before we could do that, Leah had announced that we were putting a star on the top of the tree this year, damnit!  NO ANGELS.

I have a lovely white angel with beautiful feathery fluffy wings that Mike and I received as a Christmas gift from his aunt and uncle.  It's been atop our tree since the first year we were married.  The idea of not putting that angel on the tree was somewhat physically painful.  But I just let go.  Next order of business was to find a star.  I found that Hobby Lobby had quite a selection, so I took her over there and we found The Star Aisle.  I had asked her in the car whether she wanted a silver star or a golden one and she came down firmly on the side of gold, so our task was to find a golden star.  The first one she zoomed in on was hot pink and covered in glitter, and as soon as she saw it, that was the star.  There was no arguing, no talking her out of it, she grabbed it off the shelf and off we went.

Next stop was to get a tree.  And it was VERY cold and suddenly the idea of chopping down our own tree didn't seem quite as appealing.  So we decided to try a few spots in town and eventually found trees sitting outside at Walmart.  I tried to talk Leah into a nice 7 footer they had outside, but she decided that nothing would do but a 5 footer that was completely bound up.  I explained that because the tree was tied together, we couldn't tell what the tree looked like and maybe we should get one that wasn't tied up so we could see how the branches were.  Nope . No.  Thank.  You.  I showed her how the tree I picked was taller than the tree she picked.  Didn't care.  That tree was The Tree.  So again I said to myself, "Ok, this is Leah's tree.  it probably looks huge to a 4 year old.  Just buy the damned tree."  And I did.  It fit neatly inside the car, I could lift it with one hand, and Leah was skipping along talk to the tree and giggling and was very joyful about the whole experience.

We got the tree home and into the stand--which took some doing because the trunk was so small the tree didn't much fit in the stand---I have all the screws tightened as far as they will go.  Insane!!!  Then we cut the bindings off the tree and fluffed the branches.  And I had to hand it to the kid.  The tree wasn't half bad.

It's small.  Very small.  By way of comparison, here are our trees the last 2 years:



Just a little bit of a size difference, to say the least. I've dubbed this year's tree "Twinkie".

So we let the branches drop a while and then I explained to Leah that we had to put everything on the tree in a specific order following the LOGS method:  Lights, Ornaments, Garland, Star.  She sat patiently through the lights portion of the proceedings.  I confess it was much easier in that when I needed to put lights on the back of the tree, I just picked it up, moved it to the middle of the room, put the lights on and moved it back.

Well, after the lights were on, Leah decided there was no way the ornaments were going on next, it was garland time.  So I put the garland on and thanked my lucky stars it wasn't hot pink and then finally she deigned to allow me to put on the ornaments.  Of course midway through, I dropped one and it broke.  Leah was immediately concerned I was going to freak out because she began soothing me.  "It's ok, Mama.  It's OK.  It's no big deal.  Accidents happen.  We have another blue ornament."  It was so sweet, I had tears in my eyes.  After a point, she got tired of playing with the ornaments and put a few on herself and then got tired altogether and announced it was star time.  I'd guess we put maybe 1/3 of our ornaments on the tree, but it's definitely full. So I lifted her up in the air and she put her star on the tree.

And immediately lost her shit entirely because the star wouldn't stay straight on top of the tree.  I explained that we needed to cut the top branch down just a bit, but she wouldn't have that, nosiree, so I wound up just kind of wedging it on there.  She was very pleased with the final result.  And then we shut off the lights, Leah screamed at the top of her lungs every 4 or 5 minutes for an hour to dissuade the cats from getting involved in the tree, and we read Glenn Beck's Christmas Book "The Snow Angel" together.  Yes.  That Glenn Beck.  My father found the book at a junk shop near his girlfriend's house and thought it was a nice story and got it for us.  So yes, you might say hell has officially frozen over.

I love Twinkie.  I didn't think I would like this tree, but I love this tree.  I love her audacious flashiness.  With very few ornaments and decorations, she looks like a Vegas Show Girl.  She doesn't require me to totally disrupt my furniture.  She doesn't make it impossible to see someone sitting on the other side of the room.  She doesn't take up a ton of space.  She didn't require a lot of time.  She is sweet and fun.  And she has real presence.  She literally lights up the room from deep within her branches.  I thought my kid was crazy, but now I suspect she's a genius.

Today we were supposed to bake for two of our neighbors.  The plan was to make Chex Mix and Hershey Kiss cookies.  I always think of Penny's love for Muddy Buddies Chex Mix and it makes me feel closer to her when I make it at Christmas.  And we never made the Hershey Kiss cookies for Christmas when I was a kid, but whenever we had them it was such a rare treat that I just associate them with Christmas.

We got the muddy buddies done, and then Leah announced it was time to play the Wii.  She has recently gotten into a Scooby Doo game we have on there and that is pretty much all she wants to do.  So I agreed to play for a little while.  But we played for nearly 3 hours until it was time to get ready and go to gymnastics.  So no Hershey Kiss Cookies.  And Leah got a little bit involved in the powdered sugar part of the muddy buddies so we have powdered sugar from one end of the room to the other, and all over her clothing.  She was supremely hyper on our way to the gym and I was glad she'd have a place to run off her energy!

So tomorrow the plan is to go to the Gaylord to see the ICE exhibit.  Then we will roar home and go to our final Hospice Support Care family counseling session, which of course will revolve around surviving the holidays.  Friday is Leah's last day of school and her school Christmas party, and a party at Hospice for my writing group and our coordinator.  Maybe we'll bake cookies over the weekend, I'm not sure yet. 

So here's what I'm learning from my Good Enough Christmas:

1.  If things don't get attended or don't get done, it isn't the end of the world.
2.  The little things are the big things.
3.  If Christmas is for children, children should lead the way.  This will make Christmas look different than what we as grown ups plan, but it adds some magic and wonder to the holiday that I have never experienced as an adult.  Leah doesn't care if we have an Elf on the Shelf (which we don't) and she doesn't care if we bake 10 dozen cookies in 8 different varieties (which we haven't).  She wants to open some presents, read some stories, play some games, and put up a tree.  Beyond that, it's all gravy.
4.  The old holiday traditions are lovely.  They are important.  If they can be preserved, that's wonderful.  If they can't, it is totally fine to try new things.  And if they don't work out, it's ok that they don't become the new traditions.Continuity is good.  It does help you keep connected to the loved ones you've lost or who aren't around this year.  And when this year's loved ones are some day gone, your continued ways of doing things will keep you connected to them as well.
5.  It's not the size of your tree, it's the glitz of your tinsel.
6.  There are people out there who will talk to you all night if you need them to.  Some of them are your friends, some of them are total strangers.  Talk to the ones who will listen.  Sometimes you just need to be heard.
7.  Take care of yourself.  It doesn't have to be major--a hot shower, a favorite movie, a cup of tea, a deep breath, finish a chore you hate so it's off your list early and you have less stress.
8.  Clear the calendar.  I have things in my 2014 calendar for as late as July already.  I hate that.  And I'm going to become very choosy about what I do and don't do in the new year.
9.  Even when you mess up, keep singing. 
10.  Be thankful.  You weren't guaranteed this holiday season, but you got it anyway.  Enjoy it, savor your days.  And if you can't (and I assure you, I can't always), then at least watch others enjoy it and take something from that.

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