It's still fairly early in November, and I already have visions of sugar plums dancing in my head. No, I'm not abusing mood altering drug or drink (at least, not yet). When the weather turns crisp and my mailbox is crammed with catalogs, thoughts of the upcoming Christmas holiday start to creep in around the edges of my extremely cluttered mind. In my noggin, Christmas is always festive and cheerful and beautiful and happy and loving and peaceful AND PERFECT. In reality, it ain't always that way.
In my noggin, my house looks like this:
In reality, my house looks like this:
In my noggin, while effortlessly entertaining family and friends, I look like this:
In reality, I look like this:
In my noggin, Christmas dinner looks like this:
In reality, it looks like this:
In my noggin, months before the big day, I lovingly craft (with my own meticulously manicured hands) thoughtful gifts for every person on my extensive gift list, and it looks like this:
In reality, I put off preparing for so long I end up screaming through Walmart at 9:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve randomly tossing junk in my basket, and it looks like this:
In my noggin, my holiday table looks like this:
In reality, it looks like this:
In my noggin, each handcrafted gift is wrapped in paper I designed myself while I had a little down time between building houses for the homeless and pursuing my PhD, and it looks like this:
In reality, if I can find the scissors they will be too dull to cut the ugly paper I bought at Dollar General, and I never have the right kind of tape or the patience to wrap that carton of Marlboro or six-pack of Pabst properly, and it looks like this:
In reality, I know none of this really matters.
In my noggin, I know what Christmas is actually all about.
In my heart, I wish you and yours a festive, cheerful, beautiful, happy, loving, peaceful Christmas.
Give yourself a break; don't worry about having a perfect Christmas because, in my experience, there ain't no such thing.