Your holiday to-do list wasn’t a manifest of demands penned by a hostile captor, it was an optimistic catalog of suggestions lovingly created for your present self by your past self.

Literally everything on it is optional.
And best yet, much of it is still doable.

The Elf can show up for 2 days instead of 25.

Your un-mailed Christmas cards can go out on Friday as “holiday cards”.

You can make cookies on Christmas Eve. Or Christmas Day. Or not at all.

You are not behind: not today, not tomorrow, not even 7 PM Thursday evening.

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Holiday preparation is basically a full-time job, but the rest of life doesn’t actually stop while it’s going on. We still have kids and jobs and homes and bodies that need our attention.

It can feel like a personal failure to re-prioritize so that some things get less attention, but it’s really the only way to manage the load.

As we head into the final stretch of the holiday season, be sure to give yourself permission to reverse the order of priorities in your daily life.

You probably can’t fit it all in, so ask yourself: what are the most urgent things to tackle today?

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I used to hate wrapping presents. Or, at least, I said I did. I think what I meant was, “This doesn’t come naturally to me” and “I don’t like the end result” and also “Gosh, this takes a long time.” But one year, I decided to flip the script on wrapping gifts – I’d turn the whole thing into a fun, festive ritual, just for me.

And as I sang and sipped and mashed the wrinkled ends of wrapper together with eight or nine too-long pieces of tape, I thought about how happy I hoped the gifts would make my little crew of people, how excited I imagined they would be when they spied the brightly-colored pile under the tree and opened the packages one by one.

And yes, I learned to love it.

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Maybe your spouse or partner is just bad at giving gifts. Maybe your spouse or partner is not just bad at giving gifts, but kind of purposefully Grinchy about it. Maybe you’re just plain exhausted from performing all the emotional labor of shopping for your kids, your partner, your extended family and possibly in-laws, and not having anyone give you back the same amount of effort. Maybe you’re inadvertently making it harder on yourself by indulging in the Holiday Mom Syndrome blend of self-denial, running yourself ragged, and expectation.

Whatever the reasons you feel let down when you open your gifts, Mama: you are not alone, and what you’re feeling is not wrong.

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Holiday-colored nails may seem kind of frivolous and silly, but mine give me a rush of satisfaction every time they flash past my line of sight – and to me, that’s time and money well-spent.

Listen: it’s holiday 2020 and we need to take joy where we can get it. As we head into the weekend, is there some small, simple thing you can do for yourself that will bring a smile to your face, over and over again?

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My hand hovers over the fancier body wash I really like – on sale this week! – but I pause. “I should wait until January,” I think.

Sure, this holiday-month self-deprivation mentality is partly budget related. I spend a lot more in December, on anyone and everyone besides myself, than other times of the year, and tightening up discretionary spending where I can just makes sense.

But even right now, I could afford the body wash (especially since I’ve racked up so many ExtraBucks at CVS buying for everyone else!) And it doesn’t really make it any more or less affordable if I push the purchase off to January. Digging deeper, I know it’s not REALLY about the money.

It’s just a small manifestation of Holiday Mom Syndrome – the affliction by which we mothers feel we have to sacrifice all of our own wants and needs to make everyone else have a happy, joyful time, while also – and here’s the real rub – entertaining a deep-down fantasy that in the 11th hour, someone else will show up and make our dreams come true.

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