Most everyone I know dreams of having a perfect holiday season.
And yet everyone I know comes from a crazy family, or at least has people in their family who are crazy. I know I do.
It’s like a badge of courage, something we often talk about or carry around like a trophy — until the holiday season when we’re forced to spend time with the family members we get to avoid the rest of the year. In my house we affectionately refer to this as FFF (forced family fun).
The real joy of the holidays is in the madness, not the quest for perfection.
When I think about the holiday season and I recall the memories of my life, it’s not the perfect holidays I remember, it’s the imperfect ones — the ones when things just didn’t go quite right. Like the time we went to the mountains to cut our tree rather than buying one at the local lot. It was so cold that year that no amount of clothes could have saved us. We put the tree on the top of the car and began the hour-long drive home. As we drove, we noticed the tree was slowly becoming more and more visible as it slid off the roof and worked its way out of the ties to fly off the car into the air, nearly causing an accident.
Now that was memorable.
This led me to wonder how it is that, every year, many people start to go a little crazy trying to recapture the magic and find perfection. Thinking of some fantasy that seems to suggest they can remake a perfect Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or New Year.
There’s a quote by Leonard Cohen in which he says, “Forget your perfect offering; There is a crack, a crack in everything; That’s how the light gets in.”
The magic of the holiday season is actually in the cracks.
The incredible holidays were the ones when crazy things happened, like when you stayed up all night to make that thing your child had to have; or you drpve to the mountains to cut a tree instead of buying one and you froze your buns off; or the time a family member got so sick you had to put her in the tub to bring down her temperature.
Heck, I can go on and on with my (true) disaster stories of holidays past — those are just the ones I remember best.
The problem is we have such incredibly high expectations for things to go a certain way, and when they don’t, we get sad, disappointed and depressed.
Christmas magic is something that used to happen — and it was great fun — but the truth is you’re grown up now and you know the trick.
If you were a magician’s assistant and you knew how the tricks were done, you’d be less likely to oooh and aaahhh when the trick got pulled off on the audience. The holidays are like that. You know the trick, so the magic isn’t magic — it’s a job.
So bring back the magic. See the cracks as a part of the joy. They’re what we remember. The good stuff fades away and gets forgotten; the crazy stuff is what we remember and laugh and cry about for the rest of our lives.
That’s the real magic of the holiday season — enjoying the cracks while they’re cracking.
Mark S. Benn is a licensed psychologist in private practice and an assistant professor at Colorado State University.
