Feliz Navidad! As an homage to the dramatic telenovelas in which characters find themselves in ridiculously-over-the-top situations and love entanglements, Kira and I did our best to keep straight faces (even harder for me) through this nonsensical series of photos. We’ve been play-acting our way through a scandalous series of blog posts for years now, and it’s always fun to get dramatic when real-life has shitted on us drastically enough for the year. This is an escape – as so much of my time with Kira has been – and a very welcome one. There’s also a very important lesson here, one which took me entirely too many years to learn: the lesson of being a completely-ridiculous ass-hat and being ok with it, because there is no such thing as being perfect.
That lesson always proves painfully elusive as we try to make every holiday season the best holiday season, competing with childhood nostalgia, impossible-to-recreate days of the past, and a world that no longer seems to hold the most basic tenets of compassion and empathy the least bit dear. There’s a little more to that than I care to explore in this post, so I’ll focus on the acceptance of imperfection, as that’s where I need the most work.
Every Christmas, I set out to finish my gift-shopping early, to devise a decorating system and scheme which allows for maximum enjoyment and minimum work, and to have meaningful connections at some point with the people that matter the most to me. And every Christmas, I falter and come up short.
Every Christmas I also intend to strip things back to basics and return to the original meaning of the season, and every season I largely fail at that too. This year, I’m doing a bit better, mostly because I’ve given up on making it perfect. I’ve limited decorating to my Mom’s new home and the condo for our Holiday Stroll and Boston Children’s Holiday Hour. I banged out this Holiday Card in a quick one-stop-shot with Suzie. My shopping’s still a bit of a mess, but I just need to organize what I already have and figure out the rest.
There’s always going to be some unexpected drama that pops up – usually on the day of an office holiday party or on the eve of Christmas that leaves someone sore – and there’s always going to be the unavoidable let-down and post-Christmas-morning depression that reminds us the past is almost always best left in the past. Rather than fight it, which often only leads to more upset, I’m going to do my best to embrace all the quirks and set-backs of the season, to go with the flow and endeavor to be flexible and easygoing instead of digging in and being obstinate, even and especially at those times when principle and truth seem to matter. At Christmas, none of that shit matters. Eat the cookies, drink the egg nog, and tomorrow we may diet.
