When Christmas Makes You (or someone you love) Crazy

I’m that woman.

You know the one.  The gal who takes back her Christmas tree.

You’ve never met someone who’s actually crazy enough to return a tree?  I hadn’t either. And then I became her.

Like all Christmas debacles it happened innocently enough.  Our tried and true Jones family tree traditions were no longer possible this year. The Chinese food place we’ve always taken the family the night we purchase our tree closed its doors and the kids weren’t close enough to join in the fun anyway.

It was different, in a weird sort of way.

Rather than stewing about the changes, JP and I decided to embrace different by doing things…well, differently.  We bought our tree at a new place. We shopped on a Sunday afternoon rather than a weekday evening (note:  don’t do this unless you want a tree that’s been picked over and left standing for two days since tree deliveries come every morning except Sunday).  We hurried through the process rather than lingering to enjoy the experience.

And we came home with a tree that was easily three feet shorter and two feet thinner than any tree we’ve ever had. It looked kind of like how we felt. Sort of pathetic.

Let’s just say that not all of life is Pinterest worthy.  Can we get that little fact out on the table, please?

Now I know some women would keep the tree and make the best of it.  But after years of doing Christmas, I’ve come to embrace the fact that I’m not one of them (thankfully, so has my saintly husband).

Like my son says, “Everybody has a little bit of crazy”.  Yep. Pretty sure that includes me.

And you.

And every person we live with (and even those we don’t).

When I told JP we might need to return the tree he responded the way I would have if the situation happened to someone other than me: “Who in the world returns a tree?” Honestly, I didn’t even know if it was possible.  To save you the time and effort of having to call a Christmas tree lot if you ever face our little situation, the answer is “yes”.

As JP lugged the tree back onto the top of our SUV our neighbors stopped to remark “Aren’t you supposed to be taking the tree off your car, not putting it back on?”

So now the neighbors know our little bit of crazy.  Lovely.

But real.

The holidays have a way of making our little bit of crazy just a tad more obvious. I’m guessing I’m not the only gal whose little bit of crazy may show up sometime this Christmas.  It might not be the tree. It could be the lights, the gifts, the Christmas card pictures, the schedules or the family dynamics.  If less than ideal, they threaten to steal your Christmas peace and holiday joy.

If you let them. 

But the crazy, wacky, less than perfect moments of life–and we all have them–gives grace an opportunity to leap off the pages of the Bible and land smack dab in the middle of real life.

So how did we handle our Christmas tree debacle?  We almost let it defeat us. We came close to getting angry. But we stopped ourselves before we let a ridiculous thing like our pygmy sized Christmas tree rob us of a great memory. Instead, we did the only thing that really makes sense when life doesn’t unfold like an Instagram moment and one person shows their little bit of crazy.

We laughed.

We returned the tree.

And then we ate Chinese.

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