Tag: Christmas

The Most Important Lesson

“One of the Best and Most difficult lessons you can learn in life is that no one owes you anything and you owe yourself everything.” – FofF twitter

We have started to get close to the crescendo of the holiday season.  I see it in my family and I see it in our stores.  I see it in the local restaurants and I see it in my neighbors’ faces.  There are parties after parties, food overloads/comas, last minute stresses, shopping and shipping fiascos, final exams, and on a personal level, our family spent most of yesterday on a wild trek/scavenger hunt for the last, decent, real Christmas tree in our part of Florida.  (we found it, thank goodness!)

Over Thanksgiving, our 18-month-old Labrador dog, Ralphie, was a frenzied mess.  We had 16 people in our home and a lot of those people were teenagers who liked to swim with him, in our pool.  He was ecstatic and on total sensory overload.  At one point, someone made the comment that he was like a toddler who was beyond exhausted and just didn’t know what to do with himself.  With his long tongue sticking out, he aimlessly started pawing at everyone and everything with a wild, blank expression on his face.  I think that this is the state that a lot of us get to at some point in the holiday season, and I think that it is starting right now.  

It is at this point in the season, that it is so important to stop, pause and just breathe.  Nothing is as important as we have built up in our heads or that our stressed bodies are making it feel like.  Everything that is truly important will get done.  Everything that is meant to happen, will happen and all will be fine.  All is well. 

I love the opening quote because sometimes during the holidays, often us females particularly, try to do so much to make the holidays “perfect” with the hidden expectation that if we do everything just right, Santa or someone else is going to make the holidays “perfect” for us.  Deep down though, we know that this is not how it works.  As we are finishing up the season, we must bring the focus back to ourselves.  We must remember that no one can fill up our mind, body, spirit needs except us, and that “trifecta of filling up” is our biggest responsibility, to ourselves so that we can be there for others.  Today, we need to be honest with ourselves about what we need.  Those needs should be on the top of today’s holiday “to-do” list.  

“Slow down.  You’re too important.  Life teaches you how to live it, if you live long enough.” – Tony Bennett, on what advise he would have given to Amy Winehouse

All I Want For Christmas

With the holidays approaching, I am guessing that many middle-aged women like me are silently cursing Normal Rockwell and Martha Stewart.  I suspect that many of us are starting to wish for the same thing that we wish that Santa would bring us every year.  The item that we would like, as a very extraordinary Christmas present from Santa, is a very specialized magic wand that would magically make all of the players in the holiday season behave in their best easy-going, kind-hearted, thoughtful, understanding, non-confrontational way – the very way that we would like for them to behave.  This magic wand would magically turn our spouse, our children, our children’s significant others, our children’s friends, our parents, our siblings, our nieces and nephews, our in-laws, our extended family, our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, our pets, the UPS delivery person, the store clerks, the other people in the stores, the credit card companies and Amazon Prime, into everything that we would like for them to be, in order for the holidays to go smoothly and swimmingly.

With all of the advances in artificial intelligence, this technology may not be as far off as we think.  We could have a little button on the wand that would put everyone and everything into “happy, congenial, helpful, smooth-going” mode.  And if the players aren’t behaving in their best holiday spirit, we could press the pause button on them, like a technological time-out.  It would be like the sci-fi show Westworld, only it would be Christmas World.

Of course, the Catch-22, that we controlling, stressed-out, middle-aged female heads of households never think about when fantasizing about these fantastic magic wands, is that the players in our lives would very much like to use them on us.  When I get a little too frazzled, I imagine those who love me most, would love to put me on “pause” and shove me in the corner for a little breathing space for all parties involved.  Wow, if these magic wands did exist, and everyone was using them, would everything just be frozen in “pause” mode throughout the entire holiday season?  Would we all just look like a Christmas village display, frozen in time?  Maybe the answer isn’t the magic wand with a pause button, after all.  Maybe it’s just coming to a healthy acceptance that during the holidays, the messiness of life comes into acute focus. The family shenanigans, the money worries, the reality of everyone’s frenetic schedules, trying to stay healthy and eat right through temptation, the feeling of grief for loved ones passed, all come to a messy crescendo during the holidays.  And when things are messy, many of us middle-aged mommas go into “extra-mode” trying to cover up all of the messiness with ribbons, and bows, and tinsel, and sugar cookies.  We try to make it all appear like perfection.  Perhaps if we just accept that the messiness is there, and that it is okay that it is there, and it is not our duty to fix it all, we can just let go, and relax.  When I’m relaxed, I tend to be more easy-going, kind-hearted, thoughtful, understanding and non-confrontational.  When I look at all of the holiday madness through my relaxed lens, things look more charming and beautiful, maybe a even a little Norman Rockwell-ish or Martha Stewart-ish at times.