[Length of read: 4 mins]
My answer might surprise you. It surprised me...
It was Christmas Eve 2023 at 10:30pm and my four-year-old and eight-year-old were still doing intermittent, buffalo-like laps of our upstairs hallway. They. Could. Not. Calm. Down. No amount of pleading, yelling, or lavender essential oil had an impact. Despite my fatigue and frustration, in the back of my mind, I knew they were no longer in control of their emotions or their little bodies – the magic of Santa Claus was.
At the forefront of my mind, however, was the daunting list: the wagon and Lego storage unit to be built, the presents to be wrapped, and the stockings to be stuffed - all before my also exhausted husband and I could collapse onto our pillowtop. Add to that the fact that while our bedtime was in question, our wake-up time was not; there was not a chance that the boys would sleep past 6:30am. Also top of mind was the fact that I had been working on Project Charbonneau Family Christmas since the first week of November.
A former project manager and an HOP (Highly Organized Person) – who always gave herself 21 days to research and write a paper or to study for an exam – I knew that I would be calmer, and we would all have a more enjoyable if I started early. Or did I? Like most modern mothers, my plate was overflowing with child and household administration, my work (in my case, building a business), and the activities of extended family and friends. All before the gauntlet of Holiday concerts and Project Christmas began. I thought picking away meant that I wouldn’t clamber to find my eight-year-old that Patriots toque, that the Gantt chart wouldn’t feel unmanageably tight.
What I did not anticipate, however, was the frustration that would result from holiday execution taking a full 1/6th of the calendar year. The exasperation that would result from my seemingly “ungrateful children,” who were consciously choosing to be difficult. The mind is a complex thing. While the panic wasn’t felt at the mall or at a check-out, it was felt on my household stairs and was perhaps even more comfortable. Given my meticulous planning, it was so distasteful and demoralizing that at 10:50pm on December 24th, I uttered the most regrettable sentence so far as my life as a parent, “THAT’S IT – CHRISTMAS IS CANCELLED!”
Fast forward to Spring 2024, when I began to pepper more frequent references to those “less fortunate” into conversations with my kids. We read and reread Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree - a book that might have educated me more than it did them. I often referred to other kids who had very basic unmet needs, right here in our Region. I began exposing our kids to select bits of international news, trying to cement perspective on their place in the world. I leaned-in to these practices as Thanksgiving and particularly Christmas approached. This history loomed large in my mind on December 24th, 2024, when at 7:00pm, I braced myself for what might come.
As I explored scenarios and strategies for dealing with their behaviour rationally, rather than emotionally, I knew the fact that planning had begun in the first week of December (though I may have reshelved items in the store in November) would serve as a buffer. Quarantining Christmas to a month made it less of a “project” and more of a holiday that I was involved in, not one that I was merely coordinating.
Knowing that I only had 21 days (!), I took more of a “you get what you get, and you don’t get upset” approach when thinking about my kids, and importantly, when talking to them. I decided 2024 was the year they might learn to put on that itchy wool sweater with a smile.
While I picked away at stocking stuffers and picked-up a gift or two for my nieces, I left the “heavy lifting” to a shopping date I made with my husband – where we would share the load and deal with dropped balls together. We would negotiate new plans in real-time. We gave ourselves a discrete, conservative window of time to execute all things Christmas. In this way, we found that sweet spot between being overprepared and over planned and the melee of a toy store on December 23rd.
After the fog of the baby years, the confusion of Covid-19, and the collateral damage on the Christmas that followed, December 24th of 2024 was the first time that I fully registered the beauty and the magic of Christmas on my boys’ faces. It was the first holiday that I stepped off the conveyer belt and took precious time to notice that my four-year-old’s head still had traces of that indescribable “baby smell.” In that moment and the ones that followed throughout that holiday season, I was confident that those moments were what would remain with me. I wouldn’t remember that my eight-year-old got the exact right version of goalie gloves or that my Christmas cookie icing was so perfectly flooded that you could skate on them. And that was the best gift I could have asked for.