It all started, like so many things, when I was young. Brightly colored lights, delicious cookies, smiling aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. Stores full of toys. No school for ten or twelve days! Animated holiday specials on TV. And for me, since my birthday is December 21, the season was twice as bright.
For so many years, I tried to carry it forward, to recreate the little kid magic. Big parties, inviting everyone I knew. Two parties! One for the neighbors and one for everyone else. Decorating for those parties, baking cookies and frosting them like ornaments. Cooking roast beef and chili, nachos and home-made pizza for sometimes eighty or a hundred people. Home-made egg nog, because storebought just wouldn’t do. Christmas cards with personalized messages to as many people as I could think of. Oh, and in my single days, there had to be a significant other in my life. If I wasn’t dating anyone Halloween, I had to find someone by Thanksgiving.
Results? I must say, some of those parties were epic. The decorations were fantastic. I did successfully create many of the season’s trappings. And I also created … shall we say, collateral damage? I’m also a recovering perfectionist, so if that garland wasn’t hung just right and the gingerbread men decorated just so… And who is going to clean up this mess?
After I became a married man and then a dad, it continued. Choose a date in December to fill every nook and cranny of the house with people. Find a way to improve upon last year’s bash. Buy more lights and find a new place to hang them. And expect my wife and mother of two small children, to be absolutely stoked to share equally in all of this.
The first turning point came when my now-adult kiddos were small, and I discovered that the big neon sign I had spent the better part of a paycheck on a few years earlier to have custom-made – it read “Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men” – well I’m not sure if it was my wife or one of the kids or even myself – someone broke it. I was quite upset. Not full of peace and goodwill even toward my own family.
Another turning point came a year or two later. I was a seminary student at the time, thinking I was supposed to become a pastor. I had written a poem about the religious significance I attach to Christmas. I printed it in a festive, colorful typeface and on just the perfect stationery (oh, the hours I spent searching for the perfect sheet of paper). I paid to have the page nicely framed so I could hang it on a wall near our front door where all who entered would see my message of why Christmas should be a big deal to them. One of the elders from our church had arrived early and witnessed as I blurted some creative obscenities from the top of a stepladder because none of the hardware I had available to hang the poem was strong enough, and the darned thing kept falling.
I saw him watching me as I came off the ladder. He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and gently said, “I have something in the car that might work. Let’s go have a look.”
It was at that moment that I saw my fanaticism to recreate the idyllic memories of Christmases past through someone else’s eyes. He never brought it up again. Didn’t have to. That was at least twenty years ago.
We still love to host a few people for dinner on Christmas Day. You’ll find our house illuminated by colored lights on December evenings. Yet so much of what I used to consider essential to the seasonal celebration has been replaced by things that I value more: peace, calm, and time. Time for my family. Time to reflect on the amazing kaleidoscope of people, places and things I’ve been blessed with.
I wish you peace, eternal blessing, and greater focus and accomplishment where it truly matters to you.
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