The Undone Christmas Eve

By Sarah Bessey

It is Christmas Eve and it’s time to let go.

My tinies are four and two this Christmas. I’m also 6 months pregnant. And three weeks ago, the flu took up (what feels like permanent) residence in our house. Illness slowly marched through the house, taking us out one by one by one with precision, leaving Mt. Washmore in its wake.

My usual Christmas idylls of homemade crafting were gone. Decorations were sparse. The Christmas cards went out but it was about a quarter of the usual list. The cookies I make every year went unmade and I bought a flat of premade dough so we wouldn’t be completely cookie-less. Christmas outings to lighted villages and visits to Santa Claus were scrapped. The hand knits for each of the tinies are nothing but a few skeins of yarn in a drawer. The evening get-togethers with friends and family for tea and cribbage didn’t happen. It’s Christmas Eve and almost everything that I usually like to do, the things that feel like “tradition” now, didn’t get done this year.

But I’ve decided that if it isn’t done today, it will simply stay undone.

Today is not the day for frantic shopping or late night wrapping. It’s not the day for marathon baking sessions with Iron Chef focus or colour-coordinating decorations. It’s not a day for rushing and spinning, building a house of straw in hopes that it holds like a rock.

Instead, it’s a day for rest.

I’ve decided to embrace a bit of imperfection this year. I refuse to turn myself into a focused automaton slavishly recreating traditions today, spending my energy on things and stuff that really don’t matter much by this point.

The truth is that these past few weeks have been quite nice (well, aside from the obvious accompaniments of a family flu). There hasn’t been any panic or frenzy. No fighting crowds. Not even any guilt (well, not much anyway). There’s been good music and a lot of cups of tea with conversation. Relaxing in front of classic Christmas movies (I never tire of Charlie Brown’s Christmas) and early winter sunsets over pine trees. It’s meant that the stuff – the gifts, the traditions, the food, the decorations, the expectations – hasn’t been the focus this year.

It’s Christmas Eve today and there is much that went undone this year. But today, we’ll have hour long bubble baths. We’ll play or read books, maybe watch a movie. After soup for supper, we’ll take the tinies to our local church so that they can dress up like a cow and a sheep to sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” I’ll sit in the audience between my husband and my parents. We will all clutch our hearts over how beautiful they are and we’ll light candles as we sing the same songs being sung by so many through the ages. We’ll go home and tuck everyone into bed before sitting in front of the tree for a while and paging through well-worn Bibles to read the same story over again. We’ll probably play cribbage while eating the store-bought cookies.

No one is awarding me points for Christmas. There isn’t a medal for the Christmas Olympics. There isn’t a judge for Christmas – other than myself.

I had a good chat with Little Miss Perfect Christmas (who, not surprisingly, looks alarmingly like Martha Stewart) on my shoulder and informed her that I wasn’t playing her game this year.

In fact, I may not play next year either.

Your turn: What are you doing this Christmas Eve? And happy Christmas!

Sarah blogs at Emerging Mummy.