Making Holidays Work for You, Not the Other Way Around
This past weekend, L and I made Valentine’s Day cookies. Yes, Valentine’s Day was technically over, but we made cookies anyway. Valentine’s Day was on a Friday, you know, and well – it’s just too hard for me to engineer those kinds of projects during the week. But I still wanted to bake with L. If I were more on top of things, we might have baked cookies the weekend before, but I wasn’t and we didn’t. And you know what? We’ve been enjoying those cookies all week, in spite of the fact that Valentine’s Day is over for the rest of the world.
We did the same with Santa’s visit to our house to bring L’s Christmas play kitchen – he came after New Year’s, because that’s what worked out best. We didn’t want to assemble it in Michigan for Christmas morning there, then have to disassemble it to get it home and reassemble it again after we got back, so we just decided that Santa would come to our house the week after Christmas. He’s an accommodating guy, that Santa Claus. He didn’t mind a bit. Neither did L.
With that, I have a question for all of you: what does it matter when we follow the calendar and when we don’t? Who’s going to know? Who’s going to care?
I’m learning more deeply that the point is not when you celebrate, it’s that you celebrate at all – whether you’re celebrating a holiday or just the little things in life – and we need to give ourselves permission not to be tied to the calendar or to cultural expectations if that’s what works best for us and our families. We need to allow ourselves room to craft our days and weeks, our family rhythms, in a way that doesn’t allow our own self-expectations to steal the joy of celebration.
I confess, I’m the kind of person who is always trying to do too much, planning too many get-togethers, signing up for too many responsibilities. Every year, I get dangerously close to ruining Christmas for myself with too many commitments and self-imposed expectations. This year, when Christmas Day finally arrived, I was at the end of my rope, and I pretty much fell apart. I barely made it to Christmas Dinner. It was a real wake-up call. I thought, Why do I put so much pressure on myself? Why do I try to cram so much in?
I didn’t send out Christmas cards this year, either, and I felt bad about that for a few weeks. I like sending Christmas cards to family and friends we don’t see, to let them know we’re thinking of them and to give them a little peek into our family life. But this year, with the trip to Michigan and all it involved, I just ran out of time. Getting cards into the mail felt like a burden, not a pleasure. Eventually, I decided I just needed to let it go. When putting together a greeting card and a family newsletter sounds like an enjoyable thing to do during a free hour on some evening or Saturday afternoon, I’ll do it, and it will be fun rather than a burden.
Two of my three words for 2014 are simplify and savor, and I’m working on slowing down, giving myself room to breathe, as part of the act of simplifying our lives and savoring our days more intentionally. I’m learning to live more in the now and less within the confines of my to do list, more in a place of grace and less in a place of hurry-and-get-it-all-done. If this means that we bake heart-shaped cookies on the fifteenth of February and I send out family greeting cards in April, that we celebrate birthdays on the weekends instead of on actual birthdays and Santa shows up at our house a week after Christmas, I’ve decided I’m perfectly okay with that. No one is checking our calendar but us, after all. And no one is watching to see when or how we celebrate this life we’re living. It’s up to us to create a family life that is joy-filled rather than pressure-filled, that has room in it for us to move and dance, laugh and play, room to really savor celebrations because we’re not scrambling to pack too much in.
If you’re living in the fast lane, always feeling unprepared for the next event or holiday that’s crept up behind you, I hereby give you permission to let go, to stretch and breathe, to be the one to decide when and how you celebrate life. I invite you to join me in taking control of the calendar, in slowing down, in simplifying and savoring. It’s so much better here in the slow lane.
Blessings,
