Enjoying the Season

Christmas is coming upon us faster than we expect. Or maybe faster than I, personally, have expected. It seems to me that as I get older, time moves faster. Or maybe I'm just less organized?

Let's go with time moving faster.

Perhaps it's this time of the year, with so many things competing for our attention, that we feel a compulsion to not miss a thing. Time is too short, we think, so we try to cram as much into every moment that we can. The result is that we tend to overbook ourselves and spread ourselves very thinly, trying to be everything to everyone, everywhere.

 As the years have gone by, I've forced myself to stop and take a good hard look at what is really making demands on our time. As we get older, we accumulate more friends, more family, more obligations. We long for a fairy-tale holiday we THINK we celebrated as children, forgetting that we never saw how harried and stressed out our parents and the other people who put those celebrations together really were.

The truth is that stress and a desire to please everyone is what sucks the joy out of the holidays. The urge to make everything "perfect" takes the fun and spontaneity out of the simplest things. And the more obligations we take on, the more pressure we put on ourselves to celebrate the season in full-blown gaiety and excitement.

Doing more things faster isn't the way to celebrate. Peace and joy are the hallmarks of the season. Let's give ourselves a break and take the time to enjoy what we can and savor the moments that creep up on us when we least expect it. Those are the moments that make memories.