51 Christmases...

I'll have celebrated this year. Fifty-one. I don't, of course, remember the first one, (I was six weeks old after all), nor do I remember the second. That's the one where my mom went to the hospital and came home with the very best gift, my brother. At this point, many of them run together. I know they weren't always Joy to the World, but neither were they all hell. Perhaps that's part of the magic of Christmas... as time passes, the hell fades and you're left with the merry.

What I remember most is the feeling. I daresay that's what most of us remember. Sitting on my couch tonight watching Christmas movies with my dogs and my husband, I can feel it. I can feel the merry and bright. Every year is different, the food, the people you are with come and go, the gifts, but the heart knows it's Christmas and even when our heads aren't exactly clear enough to see it, the tiny spark of the Christmas spirit remains. Even when it's bad, we can close our eyes and remember how it felt to really feel Christmas time. 

I do remember particular gifts, the square green box of beaded necklaces that my friend SLT helped my mom pick out, the boom box, the underpants and turtlenecks. We got a lot of necessities, because there wasn't a lot of budget for luxuries in our house, but somehow my parents made those gifts magical. My mom would put numbers on the gifts, so we couldn't snoop. Living in a mobile home gave them few places to hide the presents before they were wrapped (my sister somehow seemed to find them!), and there weren't stacks and stack of them, so my mom always wrapped them beautifully and made it an adventure to figure out whose package was whose. My mom did a beautiful job of balancing Santa and the birth of Christ. We always knew what was important to our family. We marveled at how a man in a sleigh could deliver gifts in one night as well as the miracle of a baby born in a stable.

The year we three Huber kids began to doubt Santa, he stopped by our house. There was a knock on the door, and the jolly, bearded guy himself was standing on our little porch. He asked us what we wanted; told us he knew we'd been mostly good...we should keep our room cleaner (TRUE!), and I shouldn't talk back (how did he know?!), Stacie shouldn't be so bossy (no comment) and Randy should put Dad's tools back after him used them. That Santa knew because he was real.

Later that night, my parents left us "supposedly" asleep in our beds and went to visit my Uncle Don and Auntie Pam down the street. We had been told to stay in our beds no matter what, and if a kid was ever going to do what their parents told them to, Christmas Eve was the night. It was the seventies, we lived in a very small village and there is no doubt in my mind our neighbor, Gary, was always watching out for us, so we were perfectly safe. Not long after the folks left, we head rustling in the living room. Magically, of course, we didn't hear the front or back door open, so it absolutely couldn't have been Mom and Dad. It had to be SANTA. We three were all too scared of forfeiting whatever Santa brought to even peek into the living room. We were vibrating with excitement waiting for our parents to come home. When they did, they were as surprised as we were by the packages under the tree. They had been gone! Ask Uncle Don and Auntie Pam...they had been with them the entire time.

That Christmas, I do not remember what I got. I can't tell you what was in a single one of the boxes. I can tell you about the smell of wood smoke from the stove in the living room. I can tell you how my dad smelled of coffee and tobacco. How my mom smelled of Jergens lotion, the cherry and almond kind. How the homemade hot chocolate was the exact right temperature. I can tell you how my little heart pounded in my chest as I felt my belief in something wonderful grow. I remember how it felt to snuggle up with my sister and fall asleep. How everything seems lit by firelight in my memory. How beautiful and treasured that memory is.

There was the year we got ten-speed bikes when we never in a million years expected anything that grand. There were the lean years when we knew how hard our parents worked, but that sometimes things are just hard to make happen. There was the year my mom gave us blankets on Christmas Eve and told us, again, the story of the Christ child being wrapped in swaddling clothes. We didn't know at the time that the blankets were necessary because heating fuel was so expensive, we'd need them to keep warm.

We never, ever felt like we received less (even when that teacher made us write a report telling everything we received for Christmas and made us read it in front of the class -- if you're a teacher, please don't do this) but even then, we knew Christmas was about the feeling not the things. If you read what I've written so far, you maybe think that it was about the gifts for us. You'd be mistaken. You see, out of 51 Christmases, I've described four times I remember gifts, because Christmas really wasn't about Santa or gifts for us. It was about the spirit of it all. It was about the feels.

I don't know about you, but when I was little it never occurred to me that Christmas wasn't on the weekend. Christmas break made every day a Saturday, it seemed. I just assumed Christmas fell on the weekend. We'd go to my Grandma Huber's on the Sunday for lunch. There was turkey and my grandma's perfect mashed potatoes and my mom's noodles and homemade rolls. We'd have to wait until the dishes were done to open the gift our grandparents (or more likely my Aunt Ethel) got for us. There were so many of us there, the house would feel like the middle of summer. We'd go in the breezeway just to cool off. We'd sit at the kids' table and use the broken crayons that were kept in an old cigar box to color page after page in the big coloring books Grandma always had. We'd eat that old fashioned hard candy and no matter how many of us there were (literally dozens) my sweet, tiny grandma would let us sit on her lap and feel the soft skin on her arms as that wrapped around us so tightly.

My Grandma Elsie made candy. I mean all kinds of candy. Not cookies... fudge and things covered in melted chocolate or almond bark. Peanut brittle that stuck to your teeth. She made so much candy that one year we found a pan of fudge she'd put in a spare closet to cool in July. She had one of those ceramic Christmas trees she'd painted herself and later a fiber optic tree that sat next to her red lava lamp. We'd go over Christmas day and eat candy and tell her what Santa brought us while my grandpa snoozed in his recliner. When we were older they would be traveling to Florida or Texas in their motorhome, but Elsie would always call with a Merry Christmas and "what did that old Santy bring you this year?"

We always had real tree. Dad put it in a bucket of rocks, and it invariably fell over at least once after we decorated it. My mom always, always said the tree looked better after it fell. She'd tell us to squint our eyes and look at the lights, how they all ran together and looked so warm. We had a cardboard fireplace that was the centerpiece of our holiday decor. She'd put "angel hair" that was made of spun glass on the top and little things she found here and there that told a Christmas story. A little wooden nativity. A green glass stocking that once held Avon perfume. A green Christmas tree that was an air freshener. Little ornaments that she put in the corner cabinet in the kitchen that she made look like different floors of a house. In her mind, as she decorated it, she created a story about the different levels and then would tell it to us, and we'd add to what she started with using our own imaginationss, sometimes arguing with each other, because someone else's story didn't fit ours. Mom always found a way to mix them all together and make them all fit.

My dad always was the last to get up on Christmas morning. The man never slept past dawn on any other day of the year, but he seemed to stay in bed FOREVER. FOREVER probably being 5 a.m. He'd get his cup of coffee and sit on the couch by my mom while we opened gifts. My mom would make waffles for breakfast. She hates the smell of pancakes and waffles lingering in a house, so it was a labor of love on her part to make them. I remember seeing my parents sitting on the couch together and having just a small realization that they were people outside of being our parents. They were a couple, and on Christmas Day, their love seemed a little brighter.

As I got older, of course, Christmas changed. It always does. We become the givers and not the getters. The year my dad died, my mom and I didn't put up a tree or cook anything special. We sat on her bed and watched movies all day. I remember how quiet is was. No smell of coffee and tobacco. Not waiting for him to stagger down the hall, wiping the sleep from his eyes. That's one I'd like to remember a little less. But such is life. The hard days living in the memories, too.

I remember years of wrapping gifts for my nieces and nephews. I remember wrapping presents with my sister-in-law and brother until we were slap happy and doing more playing with the toys then putting ribbons on. I remember the year the kids and I made ornaments with their hand prints on them. Tiny little fingers wrapped around the bottom of a glass ball. My mom found them this year, the ones we made her. Gavin's, Sydnee's and Delaney's And she can trace her fingers across the ridges of paint their little hands made and feel that Christmas.

I remember helping my brother with his light show in his yard and Sydnee talking to the lighted reindeer, because she imagined they were real. She was making her own Christmas story, just like her Moo Grandma did years and years before. Landon jumping up and down and squeezing my face because SANTA DID COME! Gavin getting Christmas pajamas and being less than thrilled. Delaney saying "you cannot be this dumb" when I was trying to help her put the lights up for the big tree in their front yard. She was wrong. I could be that dumb.

When I married, my husband and I wanted to have our own Christmas traditions. We started by getting a real tree. The first one we could barely get through the front door and it gave my poison ivy. The next one had very few needles a week before Christmas even arrived. I remember how awkward the first Christmas with my husband and his girls felt, but by the second one, they felt like Christmas  to me. Candlelight and cocoa and the scent of pine. Their laughter and their voices quoting lines from The Grinch and Elf.  Driving around looking at Christmas lights and ooooing and awwwwing. Creating our own Christmas magic.

All of these things... the cardboard fireplace, Elsie's fudge, Evelyn's soft skin, Randy waking us at 4 a.m. and falling asleep on our floor waiting until Mom said it was okay to get up, Stacie passing out the presents, the smell of waffles and coffee and tobacco and pine, how my heart skips a beat when my husband's fingers brush mine as he hands me the coffee mug that says "Mrs. Santa", how awkward MPG is while opening gifts, the way Michaela always loves anything we give her. Sitting on the couch with Gavin and Sydnee and Landon and Delaney eating Christmas cookies they had baked. The sound of the Christmas bells from the church down the street. The messages that say "Merry Christmas, I love you" from Mandy and Danny and Addie and Alison... all of those things are the real Christmas to me.

While family and friends added their own magic to my Christmases and I'm so grateful for that, my mom is where my Christmas spirit was born, in that little house with that wood stove and very little else. I can't imagine the sacrifices my parents made to create those memories, that magic. I'll never be able to fully express my gratitude for it. I just hope I've created even a small measure of that magic for those I love. Not by the gifts, but by the spirit.  

This year, we have a tiny little girl who won't even remember this Christmas, but it will be the one all the others are built on. Every year we'll add memories and magic. And hopefully on the Eve of the Eve of her fifty-first Christmas, all is calm and all is bright, because when she looks back on them all, she remembers the spirit of it, the love, the feeling. I hope she is reminded of the shiny parts and the harder ones, because there will be hard ones, fade in the glow of Christmas lights. No hell. Just magic.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas. May your heart be light.

There are certain...

times in our lives where we are expected to "rise to the occasion*". We are expected to perform feats of superhuman strength be it mentally, physically or emotionally, because the circumstances call for it. These can range from remaining level headed in the face of a medical crisis to doing 12 hours of work in an 8 hour day, to running on very few hours of sleep over many, many days while caring for a tiny human, to conducting oneself with dignity in the face of the loss of a loved one, to making a magical Christmas while also trying to run your daily life. The expectation is that we will do what has to be done and are stronger for it and proud of what we made happen under sometimes extraordinary circumstances. That's a lot of pressure.

Who in the fresh hell decided we have to always rise?

Google inspirational quotes about perseverance or not giving up. Wait, don't. You'll throw your back out rolling your eyes. Or worse, you'll feel a demand to perform under duress in an unhealthy way. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger! What? Those are the options? Death or strength? Humans are more nuanced than that. Our coping abilities are so incredibly varied and subject to external and internal forces, that it's not always as simple as "do or die".

When I think about people "rising to the occasion", I have immediate images and memories of situations where I've witnessed just that. My friend at the hospital when her then husband was in a horrible car accident that killed his cousin... I can vividly hear her wailing when she was told the cousin hadn't survived and then her pulling herself together to go see her critically injured husband, who was too injured to be told about the profound loss.

I remember another friend writing the words "Please come. I need you." to a friend when her son was having a life threatening medical crisis. "Please pray." came another message. "I'm scared." Then her taking the lead in finding the best care for her child and receiving her miracle.

When my SIL called to tell me about my niece... "Lisa. It's Delaney. She's not going to be okay." through tears. Her voice breaking while she knew what she was telling me was breaking my heart. Crying with me on the phone. Then calmly explaining the information she had while continually offering me support and then carrying our family through the next several days and weeks.

Let's visit about this, I said the three memories I shared with you above were examples of people I know "rising to the occasion". When you read them you likely admired the part where they performed as expected in the face of adversity. They carried their burden and made things happen and took care of what needed to be taken care of. But what if the real beauty is in the reaction not the action? The wailing and the admission of fear and the breaking voice, because those are some of the realest moments I've ever experienced.

Yes, they all had to get on with it. Things needed to be done. Incredibly important things. But before that, before the doing, somewhere in the pause, in the sharp inhale because it hurts so incredibly much, in the moment before the cry when our brains have processed what our hearts can't quite yet hold, is the real rising. It's where we are so raw and wrong side out that we are being almost involuntarily honest. Perhaps the motion forward after that is all acting. It's doing what I'm supposed to do and what's expected. It's suspending the reality to do the work. For me, the getting things done isn't nearly as courageous as the hurt and fear being laid bare. The stronger isn't in the surviving necessarily, it's in the moments after we find out and the moments before we start to act, it's the part where we're living it not surviving it.

Those are extreme examples, but most of us experience the pressure to push through regularly under less intense circumstances. That daily pressure adds up. Day after day living with the expectation that we will always do what needs to be done and what needs to be done right this very second. We're expected to make things happen while making it all look so easy. We get a "well done!" with an undercurrent of "we'll do this all again tomorrow".

What if I don't want to? What if I'm tired of rising and performing and carrying and having pressure applied? What if I don't want to choose between death and strength? What if I don't want to always become a diamond?

I saw a post by a lovely friend MRR that, in essence, said people are telling us they are struggling, hurting, frustrated or in desperate need of help and oftentimes our response is "you've got this", when they've just told us they don't. It's reflexive to tell someone "you can do it" when they've said they can't. We want to cheerlead, and we truly believe they can and likely they will, but what we've really done is tell them they aren't feeling what they say they are. Bigger than that, we've let them know that they aren't safe asking us for help, because all we'll offer is an inspirational quote. What we should be telling them is it's okay to not be able to handle everything that we've been given. It's more than okay to ask someone to hold something for us. It's okay to do what you can and leave the rest. 

Somewhere along the way, we've decided it's a virtue to spread oneself so thin we almost disappear. We're expected to figure things out and stay on top of things and handle things and not complain. We've all become professional jugglers and more and more things get thrown at us and we're expected to keep them all in the air. Make the appointments, do the shopping, over-perform at work, cook, clean, fold the laundry, run the errands, care for the kids, visit family, make time for friends, wrap the presents, practice self-care, quality time with partner, cheer at the ballgames, put the damn laundry away, keep up with current events, voice your opinions, make informed decisions, be informed, floss, let the dogs out and in and out and in...and don't forget to breath and grieve and move on and never forget.

We're expecting ourselves into a nice little breakdown, and we're putting expectations on other that are driving them in the same direction. We cannot just say, "It'll be okay." because one day it might not be.

What's the answer? No seriously, I'm asking what is the answer? There are things we simply must do and things we have to get through. But maybe right now, in the most wonderful time of the year when we are all feeling the pressure to make it magical, we give ourselves permission to just simply NOT. We take one thing off our list every day. I mean obviously feed those kids and yourself and pay those bills so you keep warm, but maybe don't curl the ribbon on the presents. Or maybe you put your 8 hours in at work and close the door behind you and let it go, because it will be there tomorrow. Maybe don't fold the underpants, just throw them in the drawer. Don't make the bed. Say no to an invitation you're not thrilled to get, don't bake the cookies...don't and don't and don't. 

It could be like a good kind of peer pressure if we all agree to do less. Now, by all means, if you can't relate to what I'm writing then keep doing exactly what you are doing. If it works for you, I'm cheering for you! But if you are like me and you're feeling overwhelmed and then feeling like a failure because you're feeling overwhelmed, we could decide we've risen enough for now. We could decide we are exactly what the occasion needs just as we are. We don't need to be or do more. Perhaps if we all start doing a little less of what's giving us hell, we could do more of what is truly wonderful. Sometimes, the beauty and strength really is in the pause.

Of course, I realize the privilege in all of this. There are people who wish they had what I'm complaining about, but that doesn't make what I struggle with invalid; it just makes it mine. 

* Is it just me or does this phrase make you picture a loaf of unbaked bread in a tuxedo? Just me, huh? Cool.