Merry Christmas, Dammit!

It’s Christmas time again, and as a mother, I always feel some degree of pressure to make the holidays special for my children. I have wonderful memories of Christmases when I was growing up in Massachusetts. I have three siblings, and a dad who just loved Christmas and all of the trimmings. Each year we’d all pile into ye olde family 1970’s station wagon and drive out to Concord to buy a Christmas tree from the Boy Scouts. We’d walk around the lot, and daddy would always try to find the tallest, fullest tree. He would huff and puff and get the thing tied up on to the roof of the station wagon, and then we’d bring it home where our mom would stand on the porch with her hands on her hips and say, “I don’t know HOW you think you are going to fit THAT tree in THIS house. Sometimes daddy would have to get out the saw and trim a little here, and trim a little there until it did fit in the front door and then into the corner of the living room. I have fond memories of those days, and when I grew up and had my own children, I wanted them to have good Christmas memories, too.

A few years ago when my eldest daughter, Brianna, was about five years old I hit the wall of frustration in trying to create the perfect Christmas. I was a single mom—not part of my plan, but how things worked out for us. It was our first Christmas since I had moved back to Massachusetts from Oregon where I had been living for the past 15 years. I was determined that my child’s first Christmas in our new home was going to be picture perfect. Ever since we moved from Oregon to Massachusetts, she had been threatening to pack her bags and leave me because she missed her old home.

So, I did all I could to try to make things just right for her. When we lived in Oregon, we always had a live Christmas tree, so I went to the tree lot up on Mass Ave. and picked the perfect tree. I had no car, so I dragged the poor thing home through the snow. Our apartment was on the third floor, so I dragged the thing up the two flights of stairs and got out the tree stand. I quickly discovered that the trunk of my tree was about ½” too thick to fit in my tree stand, so I had to go back out and buy a larger tree stand. I returned, undaunted and tried to get the tree into the stand only to discover that the trunk was cut on an angle. No matter what I tried, the tree would not stand upright without tipping over. My solution was to use some twine and anchor the tree to the wall using nails. With the tree now secure, we started decorating it. We baked cookies and put on Christmas music and decorated our beautiful tree. When I turned off the lights that night and went to bed I felt good about having pulled off a perfect Christmas memory for my child.

Later on that night a crashing sound coming from the living room interrupted our blissful sleep. I crept out of bed to find out what was going on. When I got to the living room door and saw our perfect tree was flat on the floor I cursed under my breath and stomped my foot. “Dammit!” I said feeling a rush of anger and frustration and disappointment. I sat down on the floor in the dark on the day before Christmas Eve and cried. I felt like I could not do anything right. I was frustrated at having to do all of this alone. I was sure that if I had had a man around, he could have trimmed the trunk of the tree so that it could have fit in my tree stand and not tipped over and spilled water all over the carpet and the perfectly wrapped gifts under the tree.

Pulling myself together I stood up and tipped the tree into the corner and cleaned up the mess. The poor tree looked sad and listless, but I was out of options. Later on the next day, Brianna didn’t even notice that the tree was leaning against the wall. She was perfectly happy. On Christmas morning, we opened our gifts from under our crooked tree
and the world did not come to an end, nor did the ‘good parenting’ police bring me up on charges of having scarred my child for life.

After that experience I decided to forgive myself for not being able to live up to some imagined standard of the “perfect” Christmas. I decided that I was going to be easier on myself and not try to make everything perfect. I also decided that next year we’d be getting an artificial tree.