A Merry Christmas.

When I was pregnant with Ethan, I wrote briefly about anticipating what this Christmas would be like, the first one with both of our children. Even during the few months leading up to December, I found myself with joyful visions of celebrating in our warm, cozy home, baking cookies for Santa, reading the Christmas Story as a family by candlelight, having tons of priceless photos of my darling children dressed in their Christmas pajamas sitting in front of the tree together. They would be smiling brightly, barely able to contain their excitement. I painted this ideal picture of how everything would go, right down to the expressions on their faces as they tore open their beautifully wrapped packages...
First of all, if it weren’t for the blessing of overlapping nap times, I’m not certain I would have even finished wrapping the kids’ gifts at all… and even though I chose to do so in a room where our dog is not allowed, I still found myself brushing dog hairs away that were clinging desperately to last year’s left over Santa paper.
Secondly, after our Thanksgiving cookie baking disaster (where only 7 out of two dozen survived), I decided to eliminate even the possibility of adding unnecessary stress to our Christmas Eve and just bought Santa’s cookies from Walmart.
Thirdly, I forgot to read the Christmas Story to my children on Christmas Eve, as I have made sure to do with Gracie each year since her birth. I somewhat made up for it (I guess) by asking Gracie trivia questions about Jesus’ Birthday in the car on the way to our lunch with family. I am proud to say she knew every answer. I am not proud to say that this year the credit goes to her preschool teacher, not her mother.
Our house was warm and cozy, but I quickly gave up on the dream photo of my kids in pajamas by the tree. Gracie is in a “Don’t take my picture” stage (please tell me it’s just a stage, this is torture for me…) and refused to smile or hold her brother for any picture. In fact, any picture where she is smiling was either pure luck or a product of intense bribery.
Needless to say, there were details of my vision that stood in contrast to reality, but as always, these moments came together anyway, creating priceless memories each step of the way. I love that perfection can be found among the imperfect, and after taking a moment to reflect on the past few days, I realize there is very little that I would choose to change. Who cares that my attempt at a Christmas Day photo session was abruptly brought to a halt when I realized Ethan’s back was wet because he’d had a massive blow out in his new outfit? I say, the more memories the merrier. And it truly has been a merry, merry Christmas.
Christmas Eve... feeling so blessed.

Comments

  1. Platinum RoseDecember 28, 2011 at 12:01 PM

    Merry Christmas to your adorable family! I miss you all dearly, seems like it's been ages instead of a couple weeks.

    I am so glad that you are able to take the blessings from those imperfect memories, the things that didn't go as planned, or were just plain disasters compared to how you had envisioned things. Reality is often so, so different from the visions we create of how we want things to go! But I love that you share both what you'd hoped it would be, and the actual reality of the holidays, with grace and contentment. Rolling with the punches is a must to keep parental sanity :-)

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