It’s Christmas time once again! A whole month of joy and cheer, family and friends, lights and festivities. It’s a chance to show our love to others through cards and gifts. A season to be thankful for the loved ones we have around us, and we remember the ones who aren’t here this year. And for Christians, it’s a special time to celebrate the miraculous birth of Jesus.

But in our modern world, Christmas can also come with extra stress, expectations that often feel unfulfilled, and the sheer exhaustion of trying to conjure up holiday cheer for 25 days in a row. It’s December 21st at the time of my writing this, so chances are, you’ve already been experiencing a bit of this yourself over the last couple of weeks.

Now there are hundreds of articles already written lamenting the excesses of holiday consumerism, so I’m not here to harp on the lady with fifty Christmas sweaters and an entire attic full of decorations, who absolutely lives for the month of December. If you’re all about the lights and tinsel and your whole house looking like Christmas incarnate, more power to you! I’m not here to rain on your light parade.

Today I’m writing to the folks who at some point realized all the traditional hustle and bustle of the season just wasn’t for them and have been trying to do something different, but, despite their best efforts to do a slowed-down Christmas, they still feel like they’re coming up short.

Replicating Your Childhood Christmas

For most of us, Christmas was a magical thing when we were kids. It was something you looked forward to all year! You loved all the festivities – the music, the holiday movies, the decorations, the cookies and candy canes…

You looked forward to opening the advent calendar every night before bed, and you listened to stories of the Nativity and Ol’ Saint Nick. On Christmas Eve you couldn’t get to sleep until your parents threatened that Santa wouldn’t come (and even then you might’ve still peaked out the windows from time to time).

And of course Christmas morning was full of gifts and toys (and probably a pair of new socks or underwear), followed by good food and maybe going to visit Grandma. Every second of December seemed to be filled with magic!

Then… you grew up and moved out on your own. Suddenly Mom isn’t Santa anymore, and it’s all up to you to create your own Christmas magic.

So you try to replicate what you remember from your childhood. You scurry around trying to deck the halls from top to bottom, bake all the cookies and treats, and buy everyone that perfect gift (and worry that the amazon packages might not arrive in time).

You blow your budget on festive food and drinks, and spend much of the season driving around to various Christmas parties and programs. Your kids sing Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman on repeat from dawn ’til dusk, and you pray that the holiday radio station would PLEASE play something other than Mariah Carey!

You make it to the Christmas Eve service (after fighting the kids to wear a fancy Christmas outfit that’s probably really itchy) and try to focus on Bethlehem and the Reason For The Season. But in the back your mind you’re still thinking about the last minute prep that needs to

happen before the family comes over tomorrow (and snap back to the moment just in time to keep your kid from catching someone’s hair on fire with those little candles they hand out).

Then finally on Christmas day, you bust your back trying to create that magical Christmas morning experience for the kids, you struggle through the day trying to put batteries in toys and survive the sugar highs, and you hope that they won’t say something rude about the ugly sweater from their aunt when the family comes over for dinner.

Then when it’s finally all over, you sigh with exhaustion as you face the daunting task of packing up all the decorations, finding homes for all the new stuff, and trying to forget you ever heard of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Trying to “Slow Down Christmas”

Finally, after years of this madness, you become fed up with trying to recreate the magic. You can feel the humbug growing inside of you, threatening to ruin the Christmas cheer for everyone. What can you do to avoid burnout?

You google “how to slow down for Christmas”, and you go down the rabbit hole of advice. You find lots of suggestions on curating family traditions and being in the moment. You read the articles about creating mindfulness routines and simplifying gift giving. And you make a renewed commitment to focus on the True Meaning of Christmas this year and not get swept up into the consumeristic mentality of it all.

So you start cutting back on all the extra festivities. You don’t do the big family photo and greeting cards. You try to encourage family members to only get small or practical gifts for your kids (much to the dismay of the grandparent who’s love language is gift giving).

You try to make a habit of reading a chapter of Luke every day of Advent, but you missed a couple days and now it’s too hard to catch up. You purge the Santa decorations and only put up the Nativity themed stuff, but now the house feels empty and not very festive. So you try to help the kids make their own ornaments, and you end up with a few disheveled paper snowflakes and a Sunday school Christmas craft as decorations.

Then Christmas Day arrives and your toddler still has a meltdown over not getting the toy they wanted (you were trying to take the focus off Christmas being all about the presents!) and someone is upset because you didn’t make cinnamon rolls this year. And by the time it’s all over… you feel just as drained as you did last year, but you also feel like you still missed out on the Christmas spirit and the renewed focus you where hoping to find.

The Problem of Expectations

Does anyone else resonate with this? I know it’s definitely been my experience. I want Christmas to be a special time for my family, but it never seems to measure up to what I remember from when I was a kid. I attempt to slow things down and skip hectic traditions and I end up feeling like a scrooge. I try to take the focus away from Santa and Frosty and put it back on Jesus, but you can only do so much when you’re surrounded by Santa and reindeer decor everywhere you turn! Kids are intensely and inexplicably drawn to that stuff.

But this year I’ve been doing some thinking. What if the reason I’m feeling drained and let down after Christmas is because my expectations are still too high?

What if you don’t have to turn the radio to the Christmas station every time you get in the car?

What if we don’t have to have the house fully decorated, and we just have our little corner with the Nativity scene and a Christmas tree, and that’s ok?

What if it’s ok to not feel the Christmas cheer all December long?

What if it’s ok to celebrate Christmas with lots of presents and good food and enjoy the cultural festivities, along with taking time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ? I mean, I think everyone would get pretty worn out if we tried to celebrate my birthday for a whole month too!

What if it’s ok not to have a big family dinner and just do something small this year because that’s all you can handle right now?

What if we allowed our Christmas to look different from year to year, accepting the season of life we’re in, and not trying to reach some standard of what Christmas should look like?

Some years are going to be super busy – so roll with it! Go to the parties and bake all the cookies! Some years are going to be very minimal and you’ll be lucky to make it to the Christmas Eve service, let alone decorate the house.

Some years you’ll be fired up with the Christmas spirit, and some years you’ll just feel a little worn down and not really all that into it.

And it’s okay.

December doesn’t have to look – or feel – the same every year. Jesus was still born on Christmas day, regardless of whether or not you decorated your house or feel like singing Oh Little Town of Bethlehem for the seventeenth time this month.

Our Christmas this Year

This year is one of those minimal years for us. With two kids now – one being a very active crawling baby who gets into everything – and a small space, we just didn’t feel like hauling out all the Christmas stuff to trip over for a month. Shoot, I’m already way over the stuffed Nativity scene that I keep finding pieces of all over the yurt!

One tradition we did keep this year is our family Gingerbread & Stockings shindig, and that was a lot of fun! December 6th is St Nicholas Day, so we read the true story of Santa Claus, open up our stockings, and decorate gingerbread houses. Then on Christmas day we’ll open gifts from family and read the story of Baby Jesus from the Bible. I’ve found that these two traditions help keep the Santa stuff and the Nativity stuff a little more defined.

My mom also does a homemade Advent tradition with all the kids, where each day they take turns opening up a pocket with a little toy to a Christmas set, and then watch a short video on her computer. It does create a little hectic part of each day where the kids argue about who’s turn it is to open the toy or who get’s to sit on Grandma’s lap for the video. But Mom is happy to do it, so the tradition continues on!

Some traditions will look different next year, and some will stay the same, and I’m learning to be okay with that. This year, we celebrated St Nick, we decorated our Christmas tree with homemade popcorn strings, and we listen to Pj sing Jingle Bells at the top of her lungs 24/7.

And most importantly, on Christmas day we will celebrate Jesus, who came to this earth to be born as a baby, who would grow into a perfect man without sin, who would willingly suffer and die in our place to take from us the punishment for our sins, who would conquer death and rise from the grave, and who would send his Holy Spirit to live among us until his return again someday.

Merry Christmas Everyone!