I saw a friend’s most beautifully decorated tree online last year, and heaved a sigh of envy. Although I aspire to being crafty, I usually end up gluing myself to the wall in my crafting efforts, and my decorating usually looks less like the Sears catalogue than a Kindergarten class effort.
Under the picture of the tree, my friend commented that after the kids had decorated it and gone to bed, she’d re-done their efforts and made it pretty.
I remembered that remark as my kids and I put up our tree this year, and my family’s tree growing up. My mom never struck me as a sentimental person, but there they were every year, the most tacky, glittery or glued-up paper disaster ornaments that my brother and I had made over the years.
Since we’ve both moved out, her tree has classed it up considerably, but at least while we were younger, it was a matter of secret pride that she’d kept those crafts and hauled them out each year.
In movies and commercials, Christmas packages perfection - the perfectly coiffed family, all dressed in white cable-knit sweaters, grinning over their coffees at each other while holiday lights sparkle in the background. Maybe your reality is more like mine, where you wake up with bad hair and sleep in your eyes and get dragged to the tree in your onesie even before you get to have that cup of coffee while the baby wails in your face because she MUST. EAT. NOW.
But we have to embrace imperfection. Every Christmas concert has its one or two off-moments, where the kids warble off-key or honk their way through a carol. But at the last concert I attended, for once, I turned around to look at the crowd. What I saw was saw one mother glowing with pleasure.
Of course, I’m sure she didn’t care if her kids sounded like The Three Tenors. She cared that they were up on stage, fresh-faced and dressed to the nines, performing their hearts out for their family and friends.
So my parting message is this: let your kids decorate the tree. Let it be messy but perfect in its own way, with odds and ends like the little baby handprint, the yellow cloth star, the angel made of Styrofoam, or the candy cane reindeer.
Recognize that better than the gifts under the tree are the gifts you see in the ornaments’ reflection – the people around you that are the real joy of Christmas.
