Christmas can be a difficult time for those of us with little kids. There is just so much pressure.
For me at least, I want to make it magic. I love the secular part of Christmas — all of the twinkly lights, all of the gift giving, all of the carols. I crave that stuff year round. There’s very little that makes me happier than a cup of hot chocolate, some Christmas lights, lots of cozy blankets, and my favorite Christmas specials.
These aren’t just random pleasures either. These are all hard wired into me from years of magical Christmases when I was a child. Nothing was better than Christmas.
And it all seemed so simple. We said, “let’s get a tree!” and we would all pile in the car, pick out a tree, and then magically it would go up and we would put some lights on and it would be perfect. Another day, someone would say, “let’s do the outside lights!” and Bam! I would be standing on the sidewalk with my brother and sisters waiting for the big reveal.
It was all so… magic.
And thirty some years down the road, I try to recreate those memories for my children, and I realize that it’s all so… much work!
It has been hard this year getting our decorations up. My back went out. TJ has his messed up leg. Magoo and I both spent some time vomiting this past weekend.
But finally today, we made some progress. My dad came over and hung up our outside lights for us, and I worked some more on my snowflake bunting and I hung up some inside wreaths. We are still far from being done, but we are getting closer.
And so finally I started to relax a bit about the magic of Christmas, and then I started panicking because I realized that while I am in the midst of fretting about creating a magical Christmas, we are all getting caught up too much in the trappings, and we are neglecting the real meaning of Christmas. The spiritual meaning. The meaning behind the lights and the songs and the joyous celebrations.
And so then I panicked even more, and I was running around in circles in my head, and I found myself sitting in Mass tonight thinking of Gilmore Girls. Because my mind never wanders during church.
As I was trying desperately to pay attention, I kept finding my mind drifting back to that show in an attempt to determine why it has such a hold on me. Why, when I do not normally watch much television, to I find myself craving a GG fix multiple times a day? Why, when I kept her away from any grown up television for over six years, does Magoo know most of the characters on the show and the names of the actors who portray them? Why is it just so comforting?
And I think I came to an answer, but I came to it via a round about way.
The choir was singing “Immaculate Mary,” and the lyrics were about peace and gentleness, and as they usually do, they made me feel manic and chaotic.
But then I started to wonder. Can a person be high strung and be peaceful? Is peace possible for someone like me? Someone who needs to always be moving? Someone whose motor is set just a little faster than that of the rest of the world?
And I realized — yes. Peace and chaos can coexist. Because peace doesn’t come from the stillness. Peace comes from the present. It comes from being fully in the moment and trusting that the next moment will play out just as it should as long as we are acting just as we should in this moment. Peace is about trusting that we are right and that God is right and that the world, in its infinite chaos, can be right if we just take it one moment at a time.
And I thought back to the Gilmore Girls and I realized that my affinity for the show isn’t solely based on the massive amount of knitwear and knit home goods on the show. It’s because it’s a show about a bunch of really weird, eccentric people just doing them. It’s about people who aren’t trying to be other people. It’s about being okay being a goofball or a bookworm or a grump or a daughter of the American Revolution.
Gilmore Girls is about people getting by just doing things their way – without worrying about it or comparing themselves to others or wondering how or if they stack up. And peace is simply all about us all getting by doing the next right thing now.
We don’t need to know everything. We don’t need to be everything. We don’t need to compare our tree to our neighbor’s tree. We don’t need to lament Bob’s tradition because we instead choose our own. We don’t need to worry about our kids waking up and wondering why their Christmases were never magic. Because the magic of Christmas is about the peace and the joy and the ultimate gift.
So we can decorate if we want to. (And I most surely want to!) And we can bake cookies if we want to. (And I most surely do NOT want to.) And we can watch this special and skip that one. We can listen to Christmas music sometimes and regular old crappy pop music other times.
And we don’t have to worry.
And we can teach our children about the meaning of Christmas. We can talk about it. We can read about it. We can listen to music about it.
But the best teacher they are going to have is hidden within our very own hearts.
A couple of weeks ago, the priest at Mass said that it wasn’t enough to just do good. We need to do good because of God and for God. It needs to be motivated by love for Him.
And that’s how I am approaching this Christmas season. We are going to have a birthday party for Jesus. My daughter is completing a little Christmas project. We read the Christmas story as often as we can.
But more than all of that, more than all of the trappings, I’m focusing on doing it all in thanksgiving of the birth of Christ. Those lights are magic because of what happened 2000 years ago. We put up the tree in anticipation of the birth of a king. The snowflakes and the twinkles and Santa Claus and all of that — it’s all to celebrate the greatest gift given to this world.
And if we keep that in the front of our minds, I have to think that the peace of the season will be ours to cuddle and to share and to spread and to emanate.
It’s not about doing it all or being it all or doing it all the right way. It’s about doing us for the glory of Him.
Peace isn’t just for the chosen. It’s not just for a few.
It’s sitting there, right within reach, calling to us. Asking us to be silent for just one moment and hear its call.