‘Tis the Season for Moms (HaHaHa)
I love Christmas. It’s my favorite holiday. Why? Honestly, that’s probably a question best unpacked in a psychologist’s office, since if I break it all down, there really isn’t a good explanation.
The fact of the matter is that Christmas, as celebrated in the United States, is a lot of work, especially for mothers. No matter how you slice it, the holiday can feel like a marathon disguised as a winter wonderland.
Some mothers will tell you that Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday. Since I’m an absolutely wretched cook, I’ve never understood that sentiment at all. For me, Thanksgiving just consists of a lot of judgement. If it’s not about the meal itself (spoiler: it’s bad), it’s about the choices I’ve made in deciding where to buy the meal. I even took Oprah’s advice once and ordered a turkey–which I thought was a no-brainer in achieving Thanksgiving success–but instead, it became a dried-out poultry disaster my family still talks about to this day. So, if you’re an amazing cook with Martha Stewart’s flair for entertaining and decorating, I can see why you might like Thanksgiving. But for me? Not so much.
One of my strongest talents is shopping, so you’d think Christmas would be right in my wheelhouse. But where I fall short is organization. No matter what I try, I can never keep track of who I’ve bought what for and where I’ve hidden all the gifts. This has resulted in blockbuster Christmas hauls for my kids over the years. A couple of times you could barely see the angel at the top of the tree because of all the gifts. Sadly, that lapse in memory also resulted in record breaking credit card bills.
Then there were the gifts I found hidden (from myself, I guess) in closets and drawers months later. With those, I’d either confess my error and wish the recipient a Happy 4th of July and Merry Christmas or just save the gift for the following year (and hope I remember).
One could argue that if I focused a little more, I could alleviate this problem with more careful planning. The problem with that theory is that it fails to consider the multitude of other tasks required of Mom in pulling off a successful Christmas holiday.
Besides the shopping and gift wrapping (congratulations if you’re the mother who makes her own bows), there’s the decorating. If you’re lucky, you can get your husband or children to put up the tree. After that, it’s pretty much all on you to do everything else. Oh sure, there are a few families that decorate the tree together. When I say a few, I mean the handful featured in articles or on social media joyfully placing ornaments on their tree.
I’ve never been this lucky. Aside from my now 86-year-old mother, I don’t think a single family member has ever put even one ornament on our tree. Oh wait—that’s not true. My sons once put the angel tree topper on the tree after I guilted them by suggesting that if I fell off the ladder attempting that task it would be all their fault. Fortunately, they managed to successfully complete the task without incident because I suppose if one of them had fallen off the ladder themselves, it could arguably have been my fault for asking. Thankfully that never happened.
That’s not to say the results were always stellar. There were many years that that poor angel hung so precariously up there that it looked like she might be contemplating suicide, but I knew better than to critique anyone’s work lest I be forced up that ladder myself in ensuing years.
And then there’s Christmas dinner—a sequel to Thanksgiving, with all the same stress and potential for disaster. The only saving grace is that Christmas isn’t all about the food, so the memory of a failed feast doesn’t linger for quite as long.
If you’re a mom still in the thick of the “Santa” and “Elf on the Shelf” years, you have my deepest sympathy. I can only offer these words of encouragement: Unlike the infant and toddler years, the sleep deprivation you’ll suffer as a result of these two activities is very short lived.
So yes, for mothers everywhere Christmas isn’t so much a “Ho Ho Ho” as a “Ha Ha Ha,” with the joke squarely on us. That being said, I can’t think of a better holiday.
Merry Christmas!