To be honest with you, I get a weird feeling when I start to think about holidays and what it really means to me. Growing up, holidays were a good time, mixed with a lot of dysfunctional living. My mom would always do a great job of cooking ham or turkey, but we never sat down and ate it; it was always put out buffet style and we served ourselves and picked at the food all day long. Mixed in with that was the fact that both of my parents would drink through the day and be arguing or passed out by the time most families would be sitting down to a family meal. Every holiday for me is a collage of memories from Thanksgiving and Christmas past that reminds me of why I made the decision to change the direction of my family.
When my wife and I married 20 years ago, we were both committed to raising our family in a way that would leave a lasting legacy and would create a positive Christian value base versus a worldly-“eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you shall surely die” family. We both have learned over the last 20 years that we brought a lot of baggage into the marriage and we need to work hard at identifying the dysfunction and praying that God would help us change it; that hasn’t been easy, but we still work at it. Which brings us back to the holidays.
Holidays dump on us (and many others) guilty reminders of what we are not. We’re not rich, so we can’t buy a lot of presents, we aren’t close with much of our family, so we eat by ourselves, we are not honest so we spend hours scrubbing the floors before the in-laws arrive in order to gloss up the perception; the list goes on. Holidays are not what Hallmark and the commercials make them out to be; they’re rough. But at the same time, I’m glad they are still around.
I’m glad because holidays are truthful. When you don’t have money, you can’t buy everything (or even think you can). Holidays make us acknowledge that we have limits to what we could or should acquire (unless you have a credit card issue, which is another discussion for a different day). Especially right now, money is tight and many of us are having to reevaluate what is worth spending money on and what is not; that’s not really a bad thing. Another area that holidays bring truth out in is our relationships with others, especially family. Holidays cause us to acknowledge whether our relationships with others are healthy or not. We may not choose to fix it, but we still need to acknowledge it; and that’s not a bad thing (At Alcoholics Anonymous, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward getting better). Lastly, holidays make us admit that we aren’t perfect and that’s okay. We don’t have a perfectly cleaned house all the time, we can’t keep our yards manicured perfectly every day of the week, sometimes our carpets need cleaning, sometimes our cars need washing; you know what: so what? Those things don’t make us perfect, they make us human. A few years back, my wife and I decided that we don’t always have to have the perfect groomed home when people are coming over; even during the holidays. What’s important is that we show others that we love each other and that we enjoy each others’ company without all the pretense.
I’m glad we still celebrate holidays; it’s sometimes a tough struggle to get through them, but when all is said and done, we’ll be glad we chose to enjoy them rather then lament them and keep the negative legacy going another generation.
