I want to like you, December...

I want to like you, December. Truly I do. And you are definitely upping your game this year to try and win me over, with your surprising warm-weather charms.

I know it's the time for family and friends and reaching out to those less fortunate and taking a little extra time to love and care.

Yet somehow, every year, I get starry-eyed dreams of making this year different and somehow, it all ends up like a piled up jumble of tree lights thrown in a plastic green bin.

I have great plans of weekly advent readings and cozy fireside contemplative journaling and cute seasonal crafts with my kids and giving plates brimming with an array of homemade goodies to every friend and neighbor and service provider I know. I plan to scour TJMaxx and add a few new meaningful pieces to my much-lacking Christmas decor collection. I am going to host a Christmas party! YES this is the year. A bangin’ swingin’ good time party. Maybe a dressed up cocktail party or ugly christmas sweater. I haven’t decided. I will record all the christmas shows and we will cuddle with the kids and watch them nightly while eating freshly baked goods with zero calories. I will buy thoughtful gifts - not just cheesy marketed crap - but locally crafted gifts that give back and wrap them up in brown paper and twine with a fresh sprig of balsam. I will take the kids to several Christmas concerts and plays and outdoor live nativity scenes and bethlehem walks and festivals! David and I will have a couple romantic dinner dates, shopping for stocking stuffers and enjoying holiday cocktails. It will be the culmination of all the joy throughout the year packed into one single month! Hark, the herald angels singggggggggg!

In reality, no.

This year is the flop of all flops. For starters the kids somehow found the bins of green while I was gone one day and “decorated” the house on their own. Which is sweet, but a)I was bummed I missed out on the magic of watching them do that and b)it looks like my house threw up christmas dollar general and c)the tree is only partially decorated from the half down and on one side and only has one pathetically thrown on strand of white lights. It also has not been watered. And is dying a slow and painful dry death. The days were crazy following and I had all the intentions in the world of actually decorating but by the time the month’s days got into the double digits I thought “what the heck, Christmas is almost over” and put the lids on the green bins and hauled them out to the garage and called it “decorated.”

I decided early in the month I would SIMPLIFY. Yes, simplify. Choose commitments wisely. Yet somehow every day in my planner had scribbles on it from dawn till dusk and I just found myself bouncing from one event to another, meanwhile nursing a constant cold due to pure exhaustion. 3 kids class parties, hosting events, church functions, fitness classes… it just never stopped. Which is why suddenly every dinner hour had me going “oh yeah…. dinner” and in a spirit of pure panic I either concocted a black bean quinoa one pot dish or gave up entirely and resorted to leftovers (until those ran out and it became take out).

In my defense, two things totally threw me for a loop this month.

First off, BRACES. No matter that I’m 31, jaw shifting is no respecter of persons and it happened. When I would try and talk sometimes and my jaw would  lock up.  Well, if you know me, you know what a tragedy that is. So they loaded up my mouth with these metal brackets that weigh 5,000 lbs and make speed eating hard and trap 55% of your food intake in the front braces. It also added 20 min to my bedtime routine, which has made going to bed difficult. It was already hard enough, seeing as  nighttime equates parental morsels of sanity and it is not so easily relinquished. But now knowing I have a date with a water flosser, a needle and thread flosser, fluoride, and mechanical toothbrush, I procrastinate as long as possible. New bedtime: between 12pm-1am. So great for my health and sanity, I assure you.

It also makes you feel super sexy. As in, you don’t want anyone close to your mouth and kissing seems like a chore. Also great for marital relations. Which is precisely why I’m using this mouth version of the chastity belt as my tactic of choice for preserving my high schoolers when the time comes. Make no bones about it, Momma has gone before and knows how to keep your wayward puckers tightly sealed and your focus turned to prayers for the day of metal mouth liberation.

Second off, BABY DOG. AKA UN-TRAINED PUPPY.

I am bored. Very bored. So please insert a peeing, chewing, barking, nipping dog into my life. Just to liven it up a bit. I also greatly lack human contact and needs to service, so I would love to add this element into my day. When the big girls are home from school, it’s their job to clean up the poop piles on my carpet and salvage my favorite boots from being chewed up and feed and water and play with and take outside the pup. But Mon-Fri 8:30-4 guess who’s job it is!?? Mine. Bored ole mom’s job MINE. Don’t get me wrong. He is cute and furry. And cuddly when he is bored with his lack of potty training and chewing needs, so I will just in my spare time research how to train a dog and care for him properly. Please, hand me pamphlets of the happy family running in a field with their dog. Nothing would thrill me more.

But other than that, it’s Christmas as usual. So I decide to focus my energies on serving our community. I’m sick sick sick of our privileged and sheltered life and want to get out there and get my hands dirty and be a missionary on my own field in Franklin. So I fill out every application to serve I can find for the holidays: help serve at an holiday mart for needy families, take a meal to an underprivileged family and host an open house for our neighborhood.

It all sounds so noble. And I truly am excited. I will forfeit the energy of shopping for gifts for us and instead pour it into this.

But first, there’s a babysitter that must be found for the younger 2 while we serve. Once that is finally acquired after a bajillion hours of effort, we go, and sit through orientation while I practically pass out in exhaustion because it's the first time I’ve stood still all day. But when we got assigned to our first family, a sweet little Mexican family with 3 kids, and helped them shop and then the mom opens up to me about her only daughter having an inoperable brain tumor and I cry with her as she says “but God love us,” I think, ok. This. This is it. The world stands still and this is Christmas and brokenness and connecting with those hurting and in need and what matters…

It lasts 5 seconds. Then we get assigned our next family of 2 old old old hardened grandmas that “don’t want no help from no high-class christians” and we try to love them but not be obnoxious as they shop for their 13 grandchildren it's just HARD. And strange. We don’t want to be cheesy but we want to connect but they won’t let us in. It’s ok. We still gave our best.

Afterward we decide to take the 2 big girls out on a big kid dinner date and it turns into a major realization that I have failed to train my 2nd born about manners entirely and we leave the restaurant and I end up in full-on mom manners training bootcamp mode in the minivan in the garage at 9pm and wonder where the heck I went wrong in my parenting.

Then we try and try to contact the family we are supposed to take a meal to and don’t hear back so we decide to take it to the sweet mexican family we met at the gift mart. I keep planning to go to the grocery store but it’s like the Mt. Everest I have to climb and just doesn’t happen so I call Cracker Barrel in desperation and order a full Christmas meal to go. We finally hear back from the other family we were supposed to take the meal to in the first place so I call back to make it 2 meals to go, but change the meat to fried chicken, per request. Then Dave informs me he has a house closing at precisely the time we are supposed to be delivering so I call back to re-arrange all the meal pick up and the drop off families to accommodate.

The day comes to take them the meal and lo and behold, the reason Eisley was up all night and crying and wallowing in our bed was nothing other than glorious hand, foot, and mouth disease or a bad case of some time of reaction to something she ate or handled…? Still unsure on that one. Either way, she’s miserable. David is in the midst of renovating our laundry room so the house is torn up and I’m trying to hold Eisley on one hip and instruct the girls on how to help me bake 6 dozen cookies of 4 different types for the open house the next day. After about 20 min of this I finally declare it Mickey Mouse Clubhouse tv time for Eisley and have my big girls babysitting her so I can finish my Mrs Claus efforts.

In between this I dash out the door for a business meeting because in the midst of it all I’m working on a business deal. YUP. Again, it’s the boredom thing. I’m really hopeful/excited about this but it’s just taking up a lot of mental space and research and emotion right now. I’m texting and calling and studying and just having lots of feels about it all. Trying to keep my head in the game and not let my emotions run with me. Just another element.

We head out to deliver the meals and have 2 hours of driving ahead of us and poor Eisley is screaming to death and grabbing her tongue frantically. I tried giving her a vitamin C sucker but she is just sitting there holding the sucker and screaming. A sight never recorded in the history of mankind. I mean, have you ever seen a kid holding a big juicy sucker and screaming? No, the screaming comes when they are holding the white stick and the sucker is gone. Yes, that I have witnessed. But this, never. Bless her. I knew it must be bad. I throw all my holistic ways to the wind and tell David “we just need to pull into McDonald’s and get her a milkshake… anything that feels cool on her tongue and helps numb it a little bit.” So we do that and for 5 glorious minutes it's silent. Bless be.

We pull into the duplex drive way and take food into this sweet family. Flora is there with her 3 kids and they all live in a house the size of our living area. I’m humbled and broken by their sweet smiles and heartfelt Christmas decorations and welcoming arms. We load up their table with food and Flora hugs me and whispers “thank you Jesus.” I just start praying for them while she hugs me and feel my heart flood with all kinds of feelings. I’m so thankful to know them and pray we can be in their lives and thank God they are in ours. Lord knows my kids need a reality check. (Is it bad that is where my brain goes? “Lord bop my kids on the head with how filthy blessed they are, bringing about a spirit of overflowing gratitude and lack of entitlement?” Sigh, mom tactics never cease….)

As soon as we get back in the car the milkshake has ended and the GPS is saying a 40 min drive to the next house.

Screaming. Screaming. Screaming.

We arrive and David gets out with the big girls to take the meal in as I try and console baby girl. The house looks nice, actually, and they seem to be having some sort of get together. Once he gets the meal in, the lady from across the street says “well, where is my box.” When David relays the story to me I cannot tell you un-christian thoughts running through my mind regarding white trash, handout entitlement, moochers, and freeloaders.  So I will keep them to myself.

By now it's 7pm and everyone is past the line of hungry and we are into hangryville and decide to break ALL rules and run through Sonic and let kids eat in the van (a family rule we do not break even on road trips, but this night is special. Reallllllll special).

We get home, lasso kids in baths and pjs and medicine and teeth brushing and get them all settled, then look at each other in exhaustion and David says “I want a burger. I’m ordering one from Chili’s to-go, do you want one.” I was just going to drink wine for dinner, but sure. At this point I will find a way to chew beef, even if I wear half of it in my front brackets and have to add an extra level of flossing. It’s worth it. BRING THE BEEF.

We sit on the couch in front of the tv and eat and mindlessly watch “My Unusual Inheritance.” A super lame show about some ancient chinese art but who even cares at this point? Everything is lame considering our life is a high-speed chase full of adrenaline rush, plot twists, and the least expected.

To add to the glories, David and I have been in a yucky season. His mom died right before Christmas so it’s always hard for him. I try and be understanding and caring and patient, but he really struggles around Christmastime. It’s an extra hard layer to it all. We had a big fight a few weeks ago, something we rarely do, but there’s a lot of elements involved and it’s just not pretty. I’m being totally vulnerable to throw this out there but listen yall, if you’re married you know, IT’S FLIPPIN HARD WORK. It isn’t pretty. It’s rarely how you dream it will be. It’s a bunch of ole sinbags in desperate need of constant Holy Spirit filling! And if you’re not married, allow me to be the friend that wraps my arm around your shoulder and says “psst. Listen here. He’s no prince charming. You’re way more screwed up than you care to believe! It’s gonna suuuuuuck. Reality check! You’re welcome.”

I’m not trying to be all gloom and doom. Marriage is great too. We love each other and are committed and have a good thing going, But YO, you just caught me in December and you’re starting to see how that usually goes for me.

Facebook makes me mad because I just see pictures of everyone all dressed up going to fancy dinner parties and holiday events in a cocktail dress and I don’t even own one because I have no reason to unfortunately. I want to have an entirely first-world-problems pity party for myself that I am spending the entire month in my workout clothes or pjs. Then I remember Flora and her family and feel incredibly lame. UGH. Insert more yucky feels as my black Jesus-needing heart is exposed.

I’m sitting home from church this morning with baby girl and just desperately longing for peace and gratitude. Peace in my soul that Emmanuel is here. He is with us. With me.That when nothing is cracked up like it’s “supposed” to be that it’s ok. He sees our efforts and desires, and it matters to Him. Even when we fail or screw up and are needy, He offers redemption. Every year I do my best to “redeem Christmas” but maybe that’s the problem. I always want to fix things and make it all better. Maybe He just wants me to let it be broken and messy and sit in the midst of that with us.

So I will close the laptop and go finish twisting together red and white dough to make candy cane cookies and start cleaning my house that is entirely bombed out, because in 4.5 hours an estimated 125 neighbors may pass through here. My house will be picked up but not clean, we will not have the outside of the house thoughtfully decorated like I had hoped, and I don’t think I bought enough ingredients for hot chocolate. But somehow, in our humanity, I want God to be the beauty that shines through the desperately broken places in our family. Maybe we can connect, love them, show we at least care. I’m disappointed we aren’t the glowing humans I always thought our family would be, but the truth is we are all lost needing a Shepard. Isn’t that why He came?

This Christmas I’m gonna be broken. It sounds noble, but I’m really just stating a fact. My heart fills with immense gratitude that he was born in the midst of barn animals with the intention of bringing hope to my lost heart. That he came down to connect with a needy people. He is not surprised by our broken places. He is not appalled at our lack. He is fully aware of it, and fully caring. He does not have judgement for us, but arms to embrace.

Gosh, that’s a relief to my soul. I feel I am a disappointment and let Him down at every turn. But He’s a good, good Father and pulls me in with a warm hug.

Free yourself this Christmas from all that you aren’t and fall into all that He is.