All the Christmas Activities
Author: COL Cristin Mount, MD
Keywords: work life balance, family, holidays
There I was, on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning. Spread out in front of me was a December calendar and twenty-five tiny handmade cards representing different Holiday Activities. Things like “Hot Cocoa”, “Grinch Party” and “Watch ‘Snowy Day’”. A mug of coffee sat to my left, the kids had music on in the background, and between intermittent dinosaur roars and “Mommy! He took my car!”, I stared at two other calendars. One calendar was our work calendar, the other our generic home/school calendar. It was time to plan The Holiday Activities. A process I started two years ago to better ensure we were able to cram everything in and create Meaningful Memories and Traditions.
Christmas has long been my favorite holiday season. Traditions grounded in holidays were important when I was growing up the oldest child of a military family. Much in our lives changed on an every-two-or-three-year basis, so joyous traditions held special importance. Putting the tree up on Christmas Eve happened whether we were in Texas or Germany. It represented consistency and roots in a way that “normal things” like hometowns, lifelong best friends and the same school could not.
Three years ago, we entered that period where kids remember Christmas fun with expectations and anticipation. Ignoring the fact that both of us are full-time physicians and Army officers with significant work obligations that don’t abate in December, I was determined to Make Meaningful Memories for our three small boys. It was a hectic mess. Supremely capable of multi-tasking at work and multi-tasking the usual home management burden that many of us carry, the added pressure of Making Meaningful Memories was just too much. Activities that should have been fun became chores, rushed into the space between the end of the workday and bedtime. Even worse, I had created Martha Stuart level expectations for myself. Why, of course I can MAKE and decorate beautiful sugar cookies in between breastfeeding a two-month-old and taking ICU call. And yes, I can absolutely make DIY Christmas “things” to hand out to work friends and colleagues – no problem! My husband, wisely, helped where I’d let him. I ended that Christmas season exhausted, having not really enjoyed myself at all.
My entire professional life as an Intensivist boils down to bringing order to chaos. When things are a mess, I fix them. By system. So, the next year, I laid out All The Activities, labeled on tiny (handmade) cards, and mapped them onto a calendar. Now I knew when we were going to Zoo Lights, when cookies should be baked and when I could shop. Bonus, at least now my husband could anticipate when I was going to push myself too far in the effort to Make Meaningful Memories. I was finally able to take it down a notch or two and not crawl out of bed on the 26th wondering what I had just put myself through.
Here I am now, buoyed by my success, on a Saturday in mid-November. Balancing coffee, “get off your brother!”, and now THREE calendars. The first thing I did on the Activities Map was pencil in my work schedule. Oof – 26 November through 18 December in the ICU and only two days off – who the heck did that? (Cue me, reminding myself that I must learn to say “no”). Then I penciled in my husband’s schedule and the school schedule. Now to balance The Activities across this map. We usually like to put our Christmas tree up the first weekend in December, but I’m working nights that weekend, so that won’t work. We want to go to our local Zoo Lights but need a weeknight (so it isn’t too busy), where both of us are home, not on-call and can get there when it opens. This was going to be hard! I realized that many things I obligate myself to do each year aren’t even on the Activities list. How was I going to get those done too?
I took a deep breath and muttered to myself, “what if we DON’T do All The Activities?”. Shocked that the mere thought didn’t induce panic, I moved to the second-best thing I do as an Intensivist, cutting out the unnecessary stuff. Like discontinuing polypharmacy in a geriatric septic patient, I eyed those tiny cards and started discarding Activities that weren’t going to make the cut this year. I gave myself permission – actually, I finally listened to my husband, who had been giving me permission for years - to scale down. Do what I felt was essential for Making Meaningful Memories. Things I truly enjoyed, or the kids truly enjoyed, and let the rest go. I identified the things that were super easy for one parent to do – “Dance Party”, “Snowman Pancakes”, or things I could count twice, the school Christmas Program night is now tagged as “Singing Christmas Songs”. No DIY gifts for colleagues and friends. Gift cards for out-of-town family members are just fine this year. I’m not going to cook, from scratch, a large meal for my husband’s fellowship Christmas party – thus the Christmas CrockPotLuck has been born. We’re still going to make bird feeders and drink hot chocolate. The tree and the decorations will go up (at some point). I may just buy the Christmas cookies this year.
My goal over the next few weeks is to give myself some grace. Cut myself some slack. I’m going to focus on the reason for creating tradition, to help our kids feel that they have something special, something they can say is “ours”. Making Meaningful Memories matters, but only if the process is free of unreasonable expectations. So, I’m sitting here now with an altered list. A lighter calendar. Less tasks, more time. And giving myself permission to NOT do All The Activities may be the best gift I receive this year.
About the author: COL Cristin Mount, MD is an active duty Army Intensivist and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, MD. She is a Master in the American College of Physicians and a Fellow in the College of Critical Care Medicine. She, her Rheumatologist husband, Dr. George Mount, their three boys and many calendars live in Lakewood, WA (Twitter: @mount_md).
