For better or worse, those who celebrate Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, the holidays come with expectations of cherished family traditions, warm family reunions, gift giving and receiving, and heightened awareness of comfort scents and snowy landscapes.
Holidays also come with family histories full of stories of memorable meals, horrible travel conditions and family firsts, such as a baby’s first Christmas or the first Christmas without a beloved family member.
As the years pass, expectations about family observances reflect changes necessitated by aging family members and profound losses. Every new holiday gathering brings together an untold number of previous holiday memories.
Memories and traditions come with whimsical images of being together with your family. Culturally, we are inundated with pictures and advertisements of idyllic families and storybook-decorated homes. There is not so much as a hint of anything less than perfect.
But real life reminds of us of the impossibility of perfection. Family members seated at the holiday dinner table include the criticizer, the complainer, the happy one, the aloof one, the humorous one, the anxious one, the proud one, the reluctant one, the quiet one, the talkative one and so on. It is a gathering of real people who bring an untold number of feelings, expectations, beliefs, attitudes and imperfections.
It is the indomitable imperfections that lead us to stress: How do we balance imperfection and the prevailing images of a perfect holiday?
Accepting imperfections
It is so easy to be drawn in by the magical images of beautiful and flawless families at the Thanksgiving dinner or opening presents under a spectacularly decorated tree. It is just as easy to judge ourselves if we do not create our own idyllic holiday. Even though we know, intellectually, the pictures and advertisements are depicting a fantasy, emotionally, there is a real pull to set the bar impossibly high. And when our expectations and fantasies are perceived to fall short, disappointment and negativity are quick to jump in.
What if we created our own family pictures and images and deleted the storybook scenes? Instead of trying to re-create the glossy magazine pictures and holiday displays, what if we embraced our families, imperfections and all.
What if we use the so-called imperfections as a way to extend kindness and understanding? If we can observe without judging, we can find the commonality of being connected as human beings.
What is missing in the perfect, wintry family scenes is the human element of imperfection: We do not naturally appear picture-perfect. Rather, our human experiences show on our faces and in our eyes. We hold both wonderfully good and profoundly painful experiences. And that is what makes us human and connected.
Embracing our imperfections opens the door widely to everyone, including ourselves. Our family images are not airbrushed to remove the wrinkles, crooked smile, wrinkled and mismatched clothes. Rather, we consider each person’s imperfections — whatever they are — a gift. We do not try to create something that we are not, even though the pictures and movies suggest a different way to be.
What a gift to yourself and to your loved ones to say and show: “I accept you just the way you are. And thank you for the feeling of connection you bring.”
MARY MURPHY has a psychotherapy and counseling practice in lower Queen Anne (www.mary-murphy.com). To comment on this column, write to QAMagNews@nwlink.com.
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