The Perfect Holiday Season. No Thanks, Not Participating This Year.

I grant your name permission to opt out or to break any long standing holiday rule. Whether community, organized-religion or self-imposed. Signed, your signature.

(tear along perforation)

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There are moral rules and laws to serve the greater good, but what’s wrong with wearing white after Labor Day or lighting candles in daytime? I love tradition, but my problem comes in following some silly rule because of convention. And I used have lots of convention and regulation governing my holidays:

No Christmas music before Thanksgiving.

No Christmas scented anything before Thanksgiving.

Christmas cards in mail by December 17.

Christmas cookies must be made. Cut-outs with icing only acceptable form.

Have to attend latest possible Christmas Eve service to be in church holding lighted candle singing ‘Joy to the World” at stroke of midnight.

Must attend all community holiday events. (Bring can for donation along ~ danger of wrath of God if can of corn left on kitchen counter top in mad dash to make event 5 minutes late.)

White twinkling lights only.

Bake 20 pecan pies for gifts two days before Christmas.

Make shoe boxes, Toys for Tots. Any such activity must involve dragging along children as penitence for forgetting can of corn.

Artificial trees are for sissies.

The entire month of December has to be perfect.

I have to be perfect.

This year I threw open the door to my holiday perfection cell. I light candles all day long. Wickedly wonderful. I started playing Christmas music the middle of November. The earth didn’t rip apart and swallow me whole. Having my own trove of odd ornaments, this year I bought a 6 foot pre-lit white tree with colored lights. A screaming pastel aluminum Christmas tree plucked straight from a “Charlie Brown Christmas.”

I LOVE that little tree.

I’m buying a prefab gingerbread house kit and letting the children go at it unaided. I hope the end result looks nothing like the houses on the box cover. In fact, I’m going to horribly disappointed if it does. Even my Thanksgiving cactus had enough of rules this year. It didn’t bloom this November as it has done for a decade. It looks like it might bloom by Christmas.

This might make a few people nervous or ruffle some feathers, but here’s a suggestion. Make a list. What are three things most important to you in this holiday madness? What are three things most important to your family? What three things of religious significance or charitable nature you want not to miss this season? With the rest feel free to say, “No. I’m not participating.” Not because it’s not important or most worthy, I’m just giving myself permission not to feel compelled to sprinkle everything with gold glitter.

So many are hurting this Christmas. Hurting in material ways, hurting in emotional ways. Though I joked about the cans of corn, I’m very grateful for them. (Anyone who knows my husband can vouch for this.) Maybe it’s not about following some sick, crazy rules to create perfection, but reaching out in imperfection. Giving ourselves permission to step free of the illusion business and into the inclusion business ~ no matter how bumbling.

Have a most wonderfully imperfect holiday season. Guilt-free. Isn’t that why He came clothed in flesh so long ago?