Lately I’ve made lots of mental lists (and a few real ones) of all the holiday projects I want to complete, to make, to tell you about, to do with the girls and so on. Us moms get a picture in our mind of the way we want to create holiday memories for our children, giving and taking from our ideas of it being magical now and from our own pasts.
Some people have memories of everything being perfect, with the ornaments hanging as if the tree is made for a magazine. Others were full of homemade style. While I’m the mom who tries to be in the middle, I must admit it is hard for me not to go behind the girls and gently replace the ornaments in a better spot – versus have five ornaments in a clump weighing down the branch to almost the floor.
This week I let go of the things I wanted to sew, gifts I had hoped to assemble with pancake mixes and canned pears from our pear trees, and homemade felt slippers from the Martha Stewart magazine that would have been so lovely waiting on the bed for my out-of-town guests. But this week I couldn’t be Martha. My kids needed me more. And I’m fairly certain that my in-laws feet will not get cold.
From the kitchen, a big batch of candy cane cookies and buckeyes from the freezer got stretched to the max – making it to a post recital cookie party, a toddler’s class cookie exchange, and inside nine teacher gifts that went off to school Friday morning. There were no jars of pears for all or cute sewn buckets to put them in. But you know what? Our baskets worked out just fine, and the contents in them were perfect for little hands to deliver. Which is what it’s all about.
And I did not stay up late in the night putting them together just as perfectly as I had planned. I fell asleep with my nursing toddler at 8:30. The girls made cards for their teachers and handpicked the cookies to go in the ceramic containers as we took our time getting ready for school.
They ware eager to do it and wanting to help even if it meant we arrived to school late. So we took our time. My husband, who usually handles the morning drop off routine, was sick in bed with what I’m fairly certain is the flu. He was the only one in our house to get a flu shot, which I find very ironic. Hmmm, sigh, poor guy.
So unlike in years past, this year our gifts to tell their teachers how much they mean to us were quite simple, tied loosely with yarn and nothing fancy.
At home, sitting next to our tree is a tray of ornaments that no one has been inspired to hang, and the top was still bare. Then my oldest daughter brought home a three dementional snowflake she made at school and declared she wanted to put in on the top of the tree. GREAT! That’s just what it was waiting for. It fit right into my plan of making ornaments for our tree this year, in a round about way that I did not expect. But I had let go of my ideas of flowing streams of felt sewn together on our tree, and assume someone would be inspired to make something, or not. And they were!
And it all worked out beautifully, on so many levels.
