Linc came into the kitchen late afternoon and said, “This may have been the best Christmas ever.”
It wasn’t over yet for me but he couldn’t care less about wontons, ham, glazed carrots, mashed potatoes, and leftover birthday cake. At 3:48 pm he was calling it.
That kid speaks from his 6-year-old’s heart, unfiltered. And he was right. It had been a pretty damn good Christmas by all objective measures—we are all healthy, we are surrounded by family- even at a distance, our fridge is FULL, and we had the resources to gush gifts all over each other.
Baya was busy as she is. She’d already crushed through several of her new art projects and had moved onto handstand practice.
Then there was Marin. At nearly 10, she either hasn’t caught on to the Santa secret or is still playing along. Remember many of us were double agents at this age— delighted to solve a mystery, afraid to disappoint our parents, and hedging our bets just in case we did, in fact, need to believe to receive.
With that aside, there was a little clinginess that flipped quickly to sass with a lot of flopping around on the couch announcing her boredom.
She’s catching on to a bigger, grown-up truth.
The stuff doesn’t fill all the holes.
You can get everything on your list and still feel something’s missing. You can be in a heap of loving family and still feel lonely. You can be sad while you’re singing, hungry when you’re stuffed with cookies and not know what you want to do in a room jammed with screens, games, and puzzles.
You can want something you don’t know and can’t say.
What I want her to know is that that’s okay.
I shoot for feeling happy about 50 percent of the time—and I think I’m a really happy person! All other feelings are accepted though they’re sometimes inconvenient and require regular maintenance.
Believing you’re supposed to be happy makes it worse. This is true only on Christmas and the other 364 days of the year.
I also want her to know that we don’t manifest the “stuff” (the presents, people, food, decorations, etc.) to be happy. We do it to put a stake in time. We do it in gratitude and to acknowledge others. We do it to speed up then slow down. We do it to break up our daily rituals and create a couple of weeks of novel, sparkly beauty.
Putting the “stuff” in its place makes space for all feelings to pass through without bumping into pumped up expectations.
Wait a second. This wasn’t supposed to be a sad story. From my perch, I saw her happiness in….
coaxing dad to wake up to check and see if Santa came (an annual game),
coaxing the puppy to bring the ball back just once while a few stray snowflakes fell in the yard,
eating a big Hershey’s Kiss for breakfast dessert (new, temporary meal category),
figuring out the laser tag guns first, then turning against Mom and Linc, and
creating a funky new hairstyle, comparing tiny LOL accessories with her sister, and eating self-made wontons out of the new taco-saurus.
So she’s good. I’m good. We’re all good. And Linc said it. It may have been the best Christmas ever.
