Have Yourself an Imperfect Little Christmas...

I'm in a bit of a funk today.  It's only December 4th, and I feel like I've hit the pre-Christmas freak out already.  Not a good sign.  (As my family can vouch, the pre-Christmas freak out does not usually arrive until December 20th.) Too much to do, too little time, not enough money, too much stuff to buy. Ugh.  Stuff.  Gotta buy the stuff, wrap the stuff, hide the stuff, pack the stuff in the van and drive it 6 hours to the relatives' houses.  I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about it all.

And to be honest, I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about all the Christmas traditions that usually make me so happy.  We spent the past 2 nights decorating the house for Christmas, and it seems like each night it's ended up being the same peppermint-covered stressball we have to choke down with a glass of crappy eggnog: Kids spazz because they're SOOOOOO EXCITED and I stress because there's a lot of fragile stuff in the Christmas decoration boxes and I don't need another mess and puh-leeze don't get that out yet.  And then someone ends up getting on someone else's nerves and fighting breaks out, the baby Jesus goes flying though the air and the Phineas & Ferb ornament gets broken, and then I flip out and we all end up crying.

Merry Christmas.

I'm sure that anybody walking past our house and looking upon this scene through our large living room windows is less likely to think "Norman Rockwell holiday scene" are more likely to think "On the next episode of 'Cops'...").  And so I end up feeling guilty about tingeing the kids' holiday memories with freak-outs.  I should be the epitome of motherly calm, right?  I mean, it's the holidays.  And they're only young once.  I shouldn't be robbing them of this magic.

And then the cat decides to climb the tree and knock some of the ornaments off.  And I wonder if I should just take the tree down and forget about it for this year.  I look at one of my nativity sets.  Mary is always so calm and so serene.  I envy her.  Here she is, just having given birth among the cows and donkeys and lambs, entertaining magi and shepherd boys and angels, living in a barn for gosh-sakes, and she's just smiling.  She's so full of joy and peace.  But it's her serenity that I envy.  It's just absent from my life right now.

In place of serenity, I have stress.  I have the normal stress of daily living and meeting commitments, and then I have the holiday stress.  I have the "my teen doesn't want anything for Christmas that costs less than $200" stress.  I have the "my middle child hardly wants anything for Christmas, which you think would be great, but then how do you make Christmas morning fair?" stress.  I have the "my youngest child wants expensive and inexpensive gifts for Christmas and understands that Mommy and Daddy can't afford expensive gifts, but doesn't understand why Santa can't and so I need to work carefully at couching her expectations" stress.  And I haven't even begun to deal with extended family stress, or baking stress, or traveling stress. Oh gosh, I just remembered the "I gotta clean the van so we can pack the van so we can travel" stress.  I'm not even ready to deal with that stress yet.

So I sit here in my pajamas with my coffee cup and the couch and I try to avoid the stress, but I know it's out there and it won't get better with time.  I think about selling some plasma so that we have a bit more cash to spread around.  I look at the Nativity again and try to focus, focus, focus on the reason for the season.  

And then I unload my holiday funk onto my blog and unleash it all on the internet because I know that there are so many other moms out there feeling similarly (dads seem to be largely immune from the bulk of holiday stress for some reason, at least in my circle of friends).  I have mom friends who are doing this all as single parents.  Friends who are grappling with grief and the holidays.  Friends who are struggling with illness, or job loss, or money problems.  And I want to say to the people trying to get through the holidays with a big mountain of stress on their backs that you are not alone.  We're all just muddling through.  We look at the picture perfect Christmas cards our friends send and feel inferior because our kids couldn't smile and get along for the time it took to take one picture.  We see Facebook posts of sparkling trees that look like Martha Stewart flew in and decorated it personally while our trees are listing slightly and covered with clothespin reindeer and glittered-macaroni snowflakes.  We hear about the super-expensive or extravagant gifts someone is buying their child or spouse and feel guilty that we can't make our loved ones' Christmas dreams come entirely true.  We see pictures of happy family gatherings, and miss the people who aren't gathered at our table.

 It should come as no surprise that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorite Christmas songs, precisely because it's not about perfect Christmases, but about hoping to have family near and hoping that all the small problems of life fly away, while at the same time yearning for the golden Christmases of our past.  But if you think about it, were those Christmases perfect?  Or have we just gilded them with fondness and nostalgia so that they seem to be?  Do we forget the freak-outs eventually and just remember the family and the fun? I don't recall my mom ever stressing over holidays, and yet she must have, being a single parent and working full time as a nurse and always having to work on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, if not both.

So maybe for today I'll set aside the guilt.  I'm not a perfect mom on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-April, nor on a busy Thursday morning in early-October, so why should I expect myself to be a better version of myself simply because it's the holidays?  Santa stopped watching me years ago. And I'm going to try my hardest to let go of some of the expectations.  Maybe someone on my list doesn't need a perfect gift.  Maybe it's okay if they just know that I was thinking of them. (I just saw a commercial for a Chia Uncle Si.  Anyone interested?  Nothing says "I've given up on shopping for you" quite like a Chia Pet, but a Chia Uncle Si?  That's like saying "I remembered that you like Duck Dynasty while I was buying milk at CVS.")  Maybe the wrapping paper doesn't have to be perfect.  Maybe I won't adjust where the kids hung the ornaments and if the cat knocks the low-hanging ornaments off, I'll just hang them back up again and go about my day.  (Although if the cat knocks the tree down one more time, all bets are off and it is full-on Mommy vs. Cat War.  Seriously.)  I'll try to be more a bit more like Mary and try to capture more of her serenity.  And I'll try so very hard to keep my focus on her son.  Once I fish his manger out of the depths of the Christmas tree, that is.

St. Patrick's Day Wrap-Up

I had a really good introduction to this post thought out.  But then I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher.  And ate a brownie.  And then I grabbed my camera so that I could post pictures in this post.  And by the time I sat down at the computer, the good introduction to this post was lost.  Boo.  The brownie was good, at least.  More on that later.

So yesterday was St. Patrick's Day.  It's a fairly big holiday here at our house.  In fact, last week Young One was asking my husband what he thought my favorite holidays were.  He said "Christmas is her favorite.  Probably Easter or St. Patrick's Day are her next favorites."  He's not too far off the mark.  Thanksgiving ranks up there too.  I like food holidays.  Big surprise.

Back to St. Patrick's Day.  Are we Irish?  Yes.  Some of us more than others.  I'm about a quarter Irish owing to my maternal grandmother's line.  My husband is about zero Irish.  So our kids get to claim 1/8 Irish ancestry.  Was it a big deal for my family growing up?  Not that I can remember.  Of course we ate corned beef and cabbage on March 17th, but beyond that, I can't recall much in the way of celebrations.  So why do I make a big deal out of St. Patrick's Day?  Part of it is because I make a big deal out of ancestry.  I think it's important for my kids to know where they came from and who their ancestors are.  (To that extent, I'm creating a family history gallery in my dining room.  It's just in the early stages, but I'm excited about it and will post more about it when it's further along.)  But the other part of celebrating St. Patrick's Day is just for fun.

So here's how we celebrated yesterday:

I was awoken at 7:00 on a dark Sunday morning.  "Mommy!  MOOOOOmmmy!  Mom!  Mom! MomMomMomMomMom!!!  Come on!  You gotta get out of bed.  The leprechauns came and they made a huge mess and you just gotta see what they did this year!"  And with that, I was pulled from my nice warm bed, my eyeglasses were handed to me by little hands, and we went out into the hall.

Leprechauns.  Ugh.  Little monsters made my trip down the stairs interesting, to say the least:

They wrapped some type of green mesh tape over the stairs.  So groggy, pre-caffeinated me had to descend the stairs in the always popular booty-bump fashion.  The leprechauns also strung up metallic streamers everywhere (you can kind of see the streamers in the top of the photo), filled the living room floor with green and white balloons, and generally left all sorts of mischief in their wake.  Wait til you see what they did to my kitchen:

Not only did those little men in green manage to haul out my donut maker, but they also somehow found all the ingredients in the pantry necessary to make green donuts.  They must have made close to 3 dozen mini donuts, but then they left the mess to be cleaned up by someone else.  Salt spilled on the counter top, ingredients left on the counter, and (worst of all in my book) they didn't rise out their batter bowl or even put it to soak.  (This is how my kids know that I'm not the leprechaun.  They know I'd never leave a messy bowl on the counter.)

After the leprechauns made donuts, they decided they needed to take a coffee break.  They got my miniature  Irish tea set down out of the china cabinet and poured some coffee and had a few donuts.  I guess mischief making is hard work.

This is how my kids know that leprechauns are truly naughty.  Because nobody is allowed to play with my miniature Irish teapot set, let alone take something out of the china cabinet.

But at least the leprechauns were nice and left us lots of green donuts to eat for breakfast, which the kids would have done immediately if the leprechauns had not also left them golden chocolates (along with all sorts of other goodies):

Slap bracelets, green beads, pencils, twisty straws - all in a green pot the kids can plant something in later on this spring.  (Did you notice the water bottle in the background? One of the kids left that on the table the night before.  The leprechauns turned the water green.)  Typically our leprechauns leave little treats for the kids each year, ostensibly to make up for the mess they leave in the house.  Why they never leave ME any presents when I'm the one who gets to clean up 75% of the mess is beyond me.  Maybe leprechauns have mommy issues.

So my morning went well - excited children amped up on green donuts and chocolate.  Major sugar crash right before we left for church.  Awesome.  But it's a holiday.  We play by different rules on holidays.

The rest of our St. Patrick's Day celebration takes place mostly around the evening meal, which I do enjoy preparing and, well, eating.  The St. Patrick's Day meal is comfort food.  Warm.  Filling.  And no matter where you go, most corned beef and cabbage dinners don't vary much in taste.  You know you're going to get pretty much the same flavors no matter where you eat your corned beef.  In fact, I remember my first St. Patrick's meal after I became a mom.  I'd given birth just a week before and I was so sleep deprived that I could not remember my first name, let alone cook a big meal.  My husband went to the local grocery and bought me some corned been and cabbage from the deli counter.  It was awesome.  Because it tasted just like mine and -best part- I could just sit on the couch in my pajamas, sleeping baby in my arms, and eat.

So here's what we had last night for our St. Patrick's Day meal:

The main part of the meal is simple to prepare: throw your corned beef into the crock pot.  Peel and halve potatoes and put them on top of the beef.  Peel carrots, leave them whole, and put on top of the potatoes.  Pour some water (enough to have about 2-3" of water at the bottom of your crock pot) over it all.  Cover and cook on low for about 8 hours.  Two hours before your meal is done, cut a cabbage into 6 wedges.  Put them in the crock pot and re-cover, and let the cabbage cook for the last 2 hours of the cooking time.  If you put your cabbage in at the beginning, it'll be mush by the end of the cook time.  Two hours of slow cooking is just enough.

At the top of the photo, you can also see the Irish soda bread I made last night.  In the past, I've made a far more complicated recipe (both in terms of ingredients called for and steps involved).  But I stumbled across a recipe on Pinterest that was only 4 ingredients and sounded simple.  I like simple.  Especially when I'm dealing with kids who refueled themselves after lunch with more leprechaun chocolate.  The recipe is on Let's Dish and can be found here.  It was a super simple bread to toss together (for the record, I don't keep buttermilk on hand so I just used skim milk soured with a bit of vinegar), knead a few times, and toss in a pan to bake right before our meal so that we'd have warm bread with our Irish feast.  It's a less complex bread than my usual recipe, but that doesn't mean it wasn't tasty.  My son ate 3 or 4 slices and declared it the best part of the meal.  I will cop to eating 2 slices with dinner.  And another one as a late night snack.  And another piece this morning after I shoveled snow.

For dessert, I made mint chocolate brownies.  

Why?  Because I could tint the frosting green to match the day's festivities.  And because mint and chocolate go so well together.  And goodness knows we can't ever get enough chocolate around here.  Again, this wasn't a super complicated recipe.  I used a boxed brownie mix, but I subbed fat-free Greek yogurt for the oil.  (See note below.)  The brownies turned out just as moist and tasty as they would have with oil, but now they have less fat and more protein.  I mixed regular white frosting from a can (softened in a glass bowl in the microwave) with some peppermint extract and green food coloring and frosted the brownies, then topped with chopped Andes mints.  And yes, I know topping the brownies with frosting and chopped chocolate kind of negates the healthy step of using Greek yogurt to cut down on fat.  Just let me live in my dream world, okay?  We have frosted brownies here.  They're magically delicious.  Wait, that's frosted Lucky Charms, isn't it?  Huh.  Well the frosted brownies are magically...good. 

Naturally, celebrating an ethnic-ish meal leads to conversation around the table, and my kids asked really good questions about who in our family was Irish, and how much Irish they were, and they asked questions about Irish history and traditions, and that makes all some of the craziness of preparing a holiday worthwhile.  Then they got into a discussion about our German heritage (there is a lot more of that type of water in their gene pool) and my son said "I don't want to be German because Hitler was German and he was evil." And I tried steering the conversation to good Germans and their contributions to society, but I got stuck and just offered them more brownies.  

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all.  May the luck of the Irish be with you.

Oh, and the side note on Greek yogurt and baking:  I'm going to be doing more of this substitution in the days ahead and try to blog about it.  If you want to try doing it yourself, here's a handy conversion chart that Chobani has on their website.  I need to make a magnet with the conversion so that I can keep it handy on my fridge.  Which, I hope you have a magnet like this one on your fridge to help you figure out the math/measurement part of those conversions:

It saves my math-challenged brain on a daily basis in the kitchen.  And it's incredibly helpful when you have to calculate how to figure out what 3/4 of a 3/4 cup is.  Because I'm not mathy like that.

Raising Women

Twice in the past week, I've been made aware by my daughters that I'm not doing very well at raising the next generation of women.

Example #1: Little One and I were having a conversation.  She said something that was pretty bright and I responded by saying "You're so smart!"  

"Don't call me that," she said.

"Call you what?"

"Smart.  I don't like being called smart.  You can call me pretty, and you can call me cute, but don't call me smart!"

Sigh. Talk about a wake-up call.  She's four years old.  FOUR.  And she's already thinking that "pretty" and "cute" are better attributes than "smart" or "compassionate."  And I'll admit, I tell my girls quite often that they look pretty.  As in, that dress looks really cute on you.  Or, your hair looks really nice today.  But I also toss out compliments like you're so creative.  Or that was a really kind thing to do.  Or I'm really proud of how well you did on that test! So why is it that "pretty" and "cute" are the attributes that are sticking with Little One?

Example #2: Middle One and I were watching the news together this morning before she went to school.  They were showing a retrospective of the entire election season, starting at the very beginning.  They showed a few snippets of Michele Bachmann's campaign and Middle One turned to me and said "Girls can be President?"

What?!?!?  How is it that I have a 4th grade daughter that doesn't know that girls can be anything they want to be - including President of the United States?

So you can imagine that I'm feeling today like I've let my daughters down somehow.  Somehow, I've let them fall into the traps that many girls and women fall into - one trap that says your value as a female is whatever is on the outside, and another trap that sets limits on women and tell us that we can't do such-and-such because you're a girl.  And both of these traps are things I've thought I've been active in helping my girls avoid.  Apparently not as much as I would have hoped.  Or perhaps those traps are just that big.

This all comes on the heels of Halloween and the horrible onslaught of costume choices for girls (and women).  Just by taking a look at the costumes available for girls, you can see why they might be concerned about their looks at age 4, or why they might not realize at the age of 9 that the office of President is something they might be allowed to aim for.  This was the cover of an ad that came with our newspaper before Halloween:

The costumes pictured are based on the Monster High dolls.  They're like Barbies, but trashier.  The skirts are shorter, the lips are more pouty, and they show more skin and sass than your average Barbie (who, for all her faults, at least aims to be President, an astronaut, a teacher, a businesswoman, etc.).  But look at those costumes that they're selling to pre-teen girls.  Short skirts.  Fingerless black lace gloves.  Body-hugging suits that give the illusion of low-slung pants, bare midriffs, and bustiers.

And this is just one advertisement for 3 costumes.  This doesn't take into account all the other costumes out there with questionable attire.  It doesn't take into account the subtle messages our girls get from TV shows - that it's the pretty girl who is popular and that she's not necessarily the nicest or smartest girl, but it doesn't matter because she's pretty.  And there's so many other things out there that tells a growing girl that she's not good enough if she's intelligent, witty, kind, compassionate, athletic, healthy, imaginative, creative or funny - she also needs to be pretty for any of that to matter.

I knew that with all of those traps looking to ensnare girls, I had my work cut out for me in raising my girls to become wise women.  I just didn't realize that it would be so hard to counter-act the messages of society and culture.  And maybe I'm failing at my job when they would rather be pretty than smart, or when they don't realize that being a president is a job open to both men and women.  But I also realize that I'm not a total failure in parenting these women of the future.  Middle One took one look at the ad pictured above and said "Ugh.  I hate these kinds of costumes.  They're sooo not appropriate for girls my age."

Small victory.