The Imperfect Christmas

Life is not perfect and I believe that is a good thing.

Over the holidays, I was reminded of Christmases past that seemed perfect in my memory. I remembered the hustle and bustle of shuffling between our home and the homes of my grandparents and my aunt. I remember going to the candlelight service at my church and I remember waking up before the crack of dawn to see what Santa had put under our tree. As if the gifts under our tree were not enough, we continued to open gifts at my grandparent’s house and then years later at my aunt’s house. I remember fancy glasses with orange juice and chicken salad sandwiches, without crust, all before ten in the morning! It was all perfect or at least that is the way I remembered it.

This year I was prepared for anything but perfect. My sister was out-of-town with her husband’s family and my parents were coming to my house and I was not ready for it!

I was dreading it so much that I could not bring myself to put up all of my decorations. I put up enough for it to look like Christmas but in my mind I was already packing it away to put Christmas far behind me.

This year, Christmas was going to be anything but perfect… but then something happened.

My son asked me when I was going to put the rest of the decorations out?  I could not believe he actually noticed. You see, I LOVE Christmas and I thought that all of these years I had decorated my house for myself. Now I know that my children noticed my decorations and that they too had a love for Christmas so I better get my act together and get ready for a perfectly imperfect Christmas.

I decided to slow down the pace of our day. Since my oldest daughter and her husband would be traveling from Huntsville on Christmas Day, it made perfect sense to start our day a little later. We still had time to open our gifts as a family but I told my parents to arrive at my house later. You see, my dad was always an early riser and he would often be at my house to see his grandchildren open their gifts. He would often arrive before the kids were even awake!

But this year, my Dad’s Alzheimer’s had progressed. More times than not, he does not want to leave his place. Dad had experienced many bad nights and we had no idea what Christmas would look like. We did not even know if he would participate in Christmas this year.

I am happy to report that Christmas happened at my house and my Dad was part of it. Instead of planning our day according to the way we had celebrated in the past, we planned our day around what would best suit my parents. We still enjoyed a wonderful Christmas meal together and we still opened our gifts together. We just moved all of our plans back a few hours and included my parents in fewer activities but still important activities. We built-in opportunities for Dad to leave if he became to restless. We set up our day so that he would be successful and not be stressed.

We tried to build a perfect Christmas out of a very imperfect situation.

It was a success!

Now we are moving on to 2019 and we have no ideas what it will look like but I can tell you that we are two weeks in to 2019 and it is not perfect.

Far from it . . .