ATLANTA — In my mind’s eye, I see her. She is the perfect Christmas woman. She is wearing a festive ensemble with jewels gracing her ears.
Her home is perfumed with the scent of gingerbread men. Hand-decorated, of course.
On her mantel are jaunty boughs, festooned with hand- sewn ribbons. And in the corner of the living room looms a massive, color-coordinated tree.
Then there is me.
My gingerbread men usually emerge from the oven missing various limbs. My packages look like they were wrapped by a demented elf.
And, just between you and me, my boughs are sagging.
Oh, how desperately I long to count myself among the perfect Christmas women. The ones who graduated with honors from the Martha Stewart college of holiday design.
But something has gone horribly wrong. You see, I’m the lady with a wreath so old, it will soon be collecting Social Security.
And when it comes to making gift tags with glue guns, I flunked the midterm.
In my defense, however, I am rather proud of our Christmas tree, which we adopted a few years ago from a neighbor’s trash heap.
True, it is merely 2 feet high and a bit frayed on the edges. But at least it doesn’t expect me to water it.
And on our mantel is a nice crèche that my husband created from old lumber scraps.
Problem is, he never got around to fashioning Mary, Joseph and the baby.
My biggest fear is that a perfect Christmas woman will drop in during the holidays.
She’ll wince when I serve her eggnog from a carton. Take one look at the tree ornaments, which include a stuffed moose and grinning squirrels, and run screaming from the house.
Every year, I promise myself Christmas will be more in keeping with the Martha Stewart school of thinking. I will start in the summer, knitting garments for everyone on the list.
But in reality, I’m the one who sewed the pockets on the wrong side of a skirt in high school home economics class. And even my scarves turn out crooked.
It’s easy to predict what will happen come Christmas day. I will walk into church like I always do, feeling like the biggest loser of all time.
All around me will be evidence of the perfect Christmas woman.
Poinsettias precisely parked on the altar. Children decked out in hand-knit sweaters with matching caps.
When liturgy is over, I will tiptoe toward the manger to behold the simple little scene: Mary and Joseph kneeling before the baby, while the animals gather round.
And if I am fortunate, there may come a moment of grace.
My thoughts will travel back in time to Mary, who surely longed for a perfect setting for her newborn son. Perhaps she envisioned a lush and cozy inn with the scent of spicy pastries perfuming the rooms.
Instead, she settled for the stable, messy and dark, and smelling strongly of sheep.
The truth is fairly obvious: I will never be the perfect Christmas woman. My gingerbread men will always be lopsided. And my trees will make Santa’s elves cry.
None of it really matters, though, when I imagine what happens next.
In my mind’s eye, I see Mary placing her baby in my arms. I glimpse the mysterious light in his eyes as I shift his warm body close to me.
Then I lean down and kiss him, ever so gently. Tell him I love him.
Even if I get everything else wrong at Christmas, at least I can get that right.
Lorraine Murray is the author of “Why Me? Why Now? Finding Hope When You Have Breast Cancer” and “Grace Notes: Embracing the Joy of Christ in a Broken World.” She will have a new book published in the spring. This story was published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
