It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
The crazy thing is that it has been since Halloween, if not before. These days, the winter holiday retail displays are now fully overlapping pumpkin spice promotions, to the annoyance of those of us who prefer that our seasons arrive with the same satisfying separation we expect from a good bra. I love Christmas as much as the next person – no, probably more than the next person – but the unrelenting march to holly jolly, with the attendant marketing spin, is disconcerting.
The thing is, the ad agencies and retail space designers know what they are doing. They know that they are not really selling pre-lit, pre-scented trees. They are selling an idea: the idea that if you buy just the right decor with just the right amount of flocking and bling you will have just the right holiday. They are playing on our hopes and dreams, which is all fun and games until disappointment sets in.
Disappointment thrives in the gap between our expectations and reality. We want so much to believe that this Thanksgiving will be the one when our perfect turkey will finally be matched by the perfect course of events on turkey day: everyone who’s supposed to come will come with the right side dishes, the right attitudes, and the right conversation topics. None of the kids will get sent away from the table. Drunk uncle Willie will show up sober. You’ll have help cleaning up. And someone will actually appreciate your perfect turkey instead of muttering that they never liked turkey anyway.
Those are the surface expectations but what about the deeper ones that are too tender to even say out loud? Like the expectation that maybe this Christmas you won’t miss your mom so much that you cry into your hot chocolate. That maybe the gifts from your spouse will communicate care and not just obligation. That maybe the grief and anger from the divorce won’t outlast your weed. That maybe the back pain won’t be so bad that you have to stay in bed while everyone else goes to the movies. That maybe your home will be full of love, at least for one day.
My invitation to you during this long lead-up to the holidays is to spend some of this time letting go. Look squarely at your expectations for the holidays, acknowledge them, even grieve them, then let them go. Letting go of our expectations is not the same as giving up hope. Laying our expectations aside actually makes room for hope by enlarging our hearts to receive the miracles that Spirit has in store for us in the coming days, weeks, and months. One of the idiosyncrasies of human existence is that, depending on our state of mind and heart, it is possible for us to be in the presence of grace and not recognize it simply because it does not show up looking the way we expected. In our digitized, artificially enhanced, highly visual culture, our eyes have been trained on images that reflect an unrealistic ideal.
Maybe if we open our hearts to hope we will be blessed with new expectations that acknowledge the truth of duality. Joy and grief can and do coexist. The love we give to and receive from imperfect people can fill our hearts in unexpected ways. In our deepest pain we can sense the Divine holding us in ways we never have before. I have a friend who, some years ago when I was distraught about an unexpected turn of events, invited me to look for miracles. As I sputtered and chugged down a road I did not choose, I found myself surprised by apparently small but unmistakable miracles I could not explain other than as love notes from God. If I had not been looking for those miracles, I do not know whether I would have seen them.
So out with the old, in with the new. Allow expectations to give way to hope and, like a child, anticipate with curiosity and receive with wonder the gifts that await.