Holiday who-be what-ee

It is the most wonderful time of the year. Our (Auston and me) Christmas tree is beautifully adorned in twinkly lights and red ribbon, and the smells of mulling spices and molasses cookies chase each other around in playful circles around our home. Snow as fluffy as feather pillows piles high on our front porch leaving every crispy cold morning feeling like a snow day.

haha

Let's get vulnerable, shall we?

My cat who, through squinted eyes, peered down on me with an inescapable regality, purred "yes, we shall darling."

This time of the year is particularly heavy for me. Yes, the sparkly trees and the feel-good music are ever so wonderful - there are dreams of nights my 28oz mug keeps magically refilling itself with decadent hot chocolate and melty marshmallows while the Polar Express lights the house with laughter and sing-along fun. Like tradition, each year I pull my brushes out and paint this lovely acrylic in my head that I will go home for the holidays and there will be nothing but sweet love, sweet cookies, and sweet memories, and each year when pack my car to travel on 71-south 500 miles back home, usually my acrylic ends up in my back seat looking like the Grinch took his own imagination to it.

The truth is that when I started writing this, our tree was sitting crooked and naked, not a single Christmas cookie had hit the oven, it has been 50 degrees and rainy for the past week and my unrealistic expectations were already getting the best of me. Another truth is that the holidays have become a task for me - a bona fide act of equalizing the tears-to-smile ratio, and I'm already sitting heavy on the tears end of the seesaw.

If you are a child of divorced parents, raise your hand. If you are a child of a single parent, raise your hand. If you've lost a loved one, raise your hand. If your family fights like a pack of feral alley cats, raise your hand. If you are stuck alone this holiday, raise your hand. If you are a human, raise your hand.

If your hand is raised, you're not alone in knowing what it feels like to experience the vast emptiness of the vacant chair at the dinner table, knowing what it feels like to watch your loved ones fight in a way that casts a gloominess across the ceiling the rest of the night, or knowing the unsettling feeling that comes with this Christmas looking entirely different than the last. I wish, for everyone, that the holidays looked like they did before our sugar plum vision-filled eyes had seen loss and tragedy - but that would be boring now wouldn't it?

This year, my 24th journey around the sun, I am collecting my holiday expectations, swathing them in candy-cane-striped wrapping paper, piling them in a red velvet sack of epic proportions, and delivering them to my local ... dumpster (or recycling bin, of course). Before I get too far, this trip to the dumpster will not be a sad one - on my way, I still plan on blasting All I Want for Christmas is You and harmonizing with Mariah Carey's five-octave vocal range knowing damn well that I might shatter my windows - it will be a delighted one as I make new space in my mind feeling unburdened and unprisoned by my old anxious thoughts. Out with the old, in with the new, bippitty boppitty boo.

One by one, I will lob the gift-wrapped expectations into the dumpster bins - my acrylic painting will come first making an underwhelming poof on its landing, next will come hope and hyperbole landing with a bigger crash. I will toss away the notion that December 1st - January 1st must be the most wonderful time of the year, I will chuck the plea for my family's arguments to be light-hearted like a sitcom on ABC Family, I will say goodbye to the expectation that only positive emotions will grace the day, I will part ways with my expectations for others, and on my way out, I will work to detach myself from frustration and impatience.

Expectation setting is a dangerous game of chess; sometimes without even being fully cognizant, I am maneuvering my pawns all over the place trying to protect my king. It is a losing battle to attempt to control an environment where predictability is next to nothingness. The vivid pictures I see in my head pose a risk for myself, and even worse, for the people around me. A lack of openness to an adverse reality can turn excitement into dread quicker than you can say snicker. One of the hardest parts is managing expectations of varying proportions - some expectations will be so minute that we will hardly be aware of them while others will be so large and influential that they will have a say in our decisions, our responses, and our attitudes.

Once I came to with the above, that my decisions, responses, and attitude were being dictated by my own self-imposed assurances, having a difficult holiday season became less about the circumstances and more about me. The holidays aren't hard because my second cousin Laura is a wicked lady who won't stop nagging me about when I'm going to have babies (never Laura, never) or because the ham turned into a crisp in the oven.* The holidays are hard because I expect my wicked second cousin to shower me in candy cane kisses for just one day and for the ham to taste like it was buttered by angels and delivered on a cloud platter from the heavens.

*Laura is fictitious and I am (yet) to burn a ham

Is it possible to have no expectations? No, I don't think so, and I don't think that's the point either. The point is to exploit your expectations before they can exploit you - this includes expectations you set for yourself, others, and situations (cough cough Chrismas) that surround all of us.

So what happens to the most wonderful time of the year when I stop labeling it as such? As the queen hopeless romantic herself, letting go of my twinkly-light-covered expectations feels like I am turning the open sign to closed on what is an important part of who I am. Instead of expecting the holidays to be the most wonderful time of the year, I will be open to the holidays challenging me to feel the wonders of the unexpected, instead of expecting everyone to be exuberant with Christmas joy, I will be open to better receiving the complex and boundless number of ways love can be expressed, instead of expecting perfection from the food to the interpersonal interactions, I will be open to every moment for what it is, raw and beautiful. To be open to the good moments also means being open to the not-so-good - to be open to labyrinthine emotions, to be open to imperfection, to be open to disagreement, to be open to burnt ham.

All I want for Christmas this year is to see every moment - good, bad, and everything in between - as an opportunity for achieving greater understanding and connection. If you and I only experienced love and joy, our depths would shrink, and our ocean of differences would overflow blurring the uniqueness between us. To view 'wonder' as limited to positive emotions is selling wonder short on all it can bring to our lives. My hope is that where I cleared out the attic full of expectations, I made space to feel greater kindness and grace for myself and others in every moment. December 1st - January 1st has no more potential than any other month to be wonderful, and, oh, how much more wonderful moments are when they are not tainted by expectation.

Spoiler alert, no cookies have hit the oven yet, but we did start working on our Christmas tree and that filled me with enough love and joy to last me until next year (and yes, your eyes are not fooling you, we did use an antler as our tree topper. Oh deer).

Happy Holidays to my readers, thank you for supporting me in my writing, it is more of a gift than you know. Safe travels to home, wherever home is - I hope that this holiday season is graced with the openness to fully experience all the moments - sugar-coated or Holiday who-be what-ee as they may be.