Photo by Beverli Alford
Dress by Undeniable Boutique, Fairfax Corner, Virginia

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Serving Up a Dose of Joy This Holiday Season

by Karen Schachter, contributing editor
http://www.dishingwithyourdaughter.com

What is your vision of the holiday season? Is it a vision of sugarplums dancing in your head and opening presents? Does your vision include the perfect home-cooked meal with extended family gathered together while expressing gratitude for all your hard work? If this is how you dream of the holidays, you are not alone. But everyone—especially moms—know that this could not be further from reality.

Here is just a clue of what my reality looks like:

• Last-minute holiday shopping and staying up all night to wrap presents
• Some home-cooked food interspersed with some store-bought goodies
• Wrapping paper strewn around my living room, which no one bothers to pick up
• The dog deciding to go the bathroom on the rug, just before everyone is supposed to arrive for dinner
• Father-in-laws arguing about politics
• My mother reminding me to call a distant cousin and invite her for the gathering
• Red wine spilled on my beautiful yellow wall
• Overcooking my favorite pie, and under-whipping the whipped cream

You get the picture: imperfection at its best.

Although my whole body used to tense up during the month of December, and I used to feel frustrated and disappointed that my mom forgot to thank me for hosting, or my husband had an extra glass of wine and didn’t help with the dishes, or my kids barely uttered “thanks” for the gifts they had said they wanted...I have finally learned to relish the mess.

I stopped trying to buy the perfect gift for everyone and started making sure I let people know, throughout the year, how I felt about them (and if I saw the perfect sweater for my Dad in August, well, I’d give it to him then).

I stopped worrying about the house being perfectly neat and the meal being 100 percent homemade, and instead bought some store-bought food and left my laundry undone, so I could spend my energy connecting with loved ones.

I accepted the fact that families argue, and kids sometimes want things they don’t play with right away, and sometimes husbands don’t help with the dishes.

And as soon as I stopped expecting perfection in me and in everyone around me, something kind of magical happened: I finally slowed down and relaxed long enough to experience the joy and magic of this season.

Because contrary to what the commercials say, this is not a season of shopping and buying and gaining weight and putting ourselves into debt and proving our love with a bigger gift.

It’s a season about taking stock of our lives, connecting with our loved ones, taking pleasure in the imperfect moments, and experiencing the unbelievable gratitude that happens when we look around and truly notice the amazing gifts in our lives.

This season, and always, I invite you to step into the messiness of your life and remember that this season, this very year, will never come again. Your children will be this age only once, and you only get this one time to embrace this very moment. Take time to breathe it in, one messy, muddy, glorious moment at a time.

© 2010 Good Living Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Photo credits: Beverli Alford and Seth Blaustein. Site by Ariela Steif.