Unsubscribing from the "Perfect" Christmas

It’s December 26th—do you know where YOUR Christmas spirit is?

Because if you’re like me, it’s buried somewhere among plastic packaging, discarded tags, and boxes that look like they were torn open by hyenas, all stuffed deep down into giant trash bags tossed out back.

Don’t misjudge me—anyone who knows me knows I am no Grinch. My love of Christmas has held strong over the years, from the magic and anticipation of childhood Christmases, through the simpler yet sparkling Christmases of my teenage and early adult years, to my current Christmas as a Parent era.

The entire season is draped in a thick, cozy nostalgia that tends to reveal itself during the most ordinary moments. The whiff of a cedar-scented Yankee Candle at Kroger suddenly sends me back to the woods behind my grandparents’ house in New Haven, playing with my cousins during one of our milder Kentucky Christmases. I hear an Amy Grant song while grabbing coffee and I’m nine years old again, sitting in my parents’ family room while my mom makes dinner on a Tuesday in December, “A Tender Tennessee Christmas” playing on the stereo. Driving home after dark, seeing holiday lights twinkling, I drift back to evenings spent riding through Lake Forest—my parents up front, my sister and me in the back—pointing excitedly at homes plastered in lights while my dad slowly cruised down every street.

I have a million more like this.

Christmastime is when those memories get unlocked from somewhere deep inside my mind. Sometimes they’re accompanied by a twinge of sadness—a mourning for those simple yet magical moments in time. But they also reinforce a deep appreciation for that feeling I still get to experience as an adult, however fleeting it may be.

The joke, of course, is that those childhood years are fast. Too fast. And all too soon, traditions shift. The sparkle doesn’t shine quite as bright. No one wants to go out in the woods anymore. Amy Grant doesn’t sing quite as often. And your beloved Santa Claus becomes a fairy-dusted memory—one you grieve longer than you realize.

Because in an instant, you are the adult now. And if you have your own little humans, you are their Christmas captain. The provider of the holiday memories. The maker of the magic. And HOLY CRAP, what a responsibility that is.

Only now, we’re living in the hyperactive digital age of social media, where we constantly compare ourselves and our experiences to everyone we know. We’re inundated with advertisements starting in September that tout the perfect family holiday experience you CANNOT miss. We see, in real time, what everyone else is doing. And something in us whispers that if we don’t do this, experience that, get pictures with all the reindeer, take our kids to build and drive their own personal sleigh, spend the night in a life-size snow globe, and shell out $7,432 on “magic,” then we're not doing it right and we should be ashamed of our lazy-ass parenting style.

But no pressure!

I’m sure the Christmas Consumerism Machine has always been alive and well in its various forms though the ages. We just happen to be the “lucky” ones living in a moment where we’re bombarded from all directions, in all formats, with LIMITED-TIME-ONLY CHRISTMAS EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. And who among us hasn’t felt that twinge of parental guilt at least once this season because… FOMO?

(Hell, it’s the exact reason I finally caved two years ago and “welcomed” a magical North Pole Elf into our home—one who looooves making messes and “eating” the peppermint Hershey’s Kisses I wait all year for, yet somehow makes our job of keeping Santa alive harder, because he invites more questions than we have answers.)

Creating magic shouldn’t be this hard.

But the beauty of being an adult is that we have something our kids don’t: retrospect. We know, from having been children ourselves, how simple childhood really is.

So I’ll be the first to unsubscribe from the notion that we must constantly construct picture-perfect holiday magic in order for our children to have perfect holidays. As fellow magic makers, let’s reject the comparisons and just do you. Take your kids to build their own sleigh. Rent a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park on a crisp December night. Drive through a neighborhood filled with beautifully lit homes. Blast Mannheim Steamroller from every Alexa in the house.

Whatever we do—and however we celebrate—let it be for one simple reason: to create moments of tradition, love, and joy for ourselves and our families, not for the Christmas Machine clogging up our newsfeeds.

Our job as parents is to create that feeling—the magical nostalgia we remember from our own childhoods—that settles deep inside our kids’ hearts and minds. So that someday, when they’re adults, a memory is conjured out of the blue… maybe while pushing a cart down the candle aisle at Kroger.

For now, though, it’s an unseasonably warm, humid, gray day-after-Christmas. My spirit-odometer is completely drained from creating so much damn magic that my kids will be living off the fumes through March. And what I’d really like is a long winter's nap—and for that damned Elf to come back from the North Pole and clean up my house.

:)

Megan