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The holidays are here and, unlike 2020, there will be opportunities for families to gather all together to celebrate. And because these holiday celebrations have been delayed a year, people will, no doubt, have even higher expectations for achieving and experiencing “Hallmark Movie Magic” moments.
I will offer that as much as I enjoy watching these G-rated, abundantly decorated, and happy depictions of family gatherings, typical holiday celebrations are usually more akin to Christmas Vacation wherein the Mom Character quotes one of my favorite holiday lines “It’s Christmas and we’re all in misery!” Although I cannot say that spending time with my family is misery, trying to satisfy the needs of everyone in a large, opinionated family, is not for the faint of heart …
You begin decorating early so that you can have time to shop and place beautifully wrapped packages under the tree, but of course, then someone will, no doubt, riffle through these presents and notice that you bought something for Uncle So And So and remark that they didn’t get the ‘gift list exchange memo’ and now, rather than looking unthoughtful and cheap, needs to go out and buy some silly gift…
You also plan the perfect meal, perhaps attempting to cook a turducken (stuffed chicken breast stuffed into a duck which is then stuffed into a turkey breast), but you can’t find plain duck breast and so you buy the whole thing and debone it yourself, watching a You-tube video and spending about 3 hours and twice as many Band-Aids in achieving your goal. And when you present your masterpiece to the table, Aunt So and So comments that the chicken tastes dry, little Cindy-Loo ‘doesn’t eat anything with bread in it and Cousin It prefers red meat and didn’t I cook a steak somewhere?
In the end, no one really cares if my strands of lights all match because they only notice the one bulb on the tree outside that isn’t lit. No one cares if I purchased fresh coffee beans made from an organic and self-sustaining farm in the doldrums of the Amazon because really, they just want decaf as caffeine after 2 p.m. will give them ‘the jitters all night and where is the regular milk and ‘none of that fufu coffee creamer stuff?’… It doesn’t matter how hard we try to replicate an unattainable experience, we cannot. In the end, it is easier to be real.
Holiday stress comes in all shapes and sizes. And since we can’t eliminate these stressors, we need to eliminate the stress we impose on ourselves in trying to attain these unrealistic moments by staying real and just letting them happen naturally.
Remember, we tend to give more meaning to the moments when something went wrong rather than when it went right. And when you are feeling down because you are lonely on the holiday, maybe…pop a TV dinner in the microwave, put on your favorite movie and enjoy the peace and quiet...
Wink! Wink!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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