Charlie Brown - Dreams verses Reality

I was looking at a blog about cool Christmas trees and it made think of something funny from a past Christmas.

When I was married way back when and was looking for perfection at the holidays I would force my husband to go with me to cut down a Christmas tree.

This was me  trying to re-create the perfect childhood holiday I had in my head. Every year we went to the woods of my grandfather's farm to pick out a tree. We would trudge through the thick woods looking for anything that even remotely resembled a Christmas tree. After a few hours (minutes probably) of searching my sister and I would start whining about the cold.

We would end up picking some awful Charlie Brown Christmas tree. We would bring it home along with whatever critters were attached to it and try to make it look good. The funny thing is we didn't do it for the family experience but because my dad was too cheap to spring for a tree and my mother didn't believe in fake trees.

I guess the funny part of the story was that I forced my husband to continue a tradition that was really awful and for all the wrong reasons.

Even the year we split at Thanksgiving I made him go with me to cut down a tree at a tree farm. I thought that this would re-kindle our love a moment in the woods selecting a tree. We were both miserable and he only did it out of pity for me. I was holding on to something that had slipped away long before that moment.

This wasn't the funny story I had planned on writing but it is what came out. It isn't a sad story to me it just shows me how much I wanted things to be my way. To create something that my mind believed existed when it didn't no matter what the cost to my emotional self.

We had some really great Christmases in our house as a child but they are a child's memories and maybe not so accurate. They can't be re created we have to work with the reality of now. We have to make new memories and enjoy the moments we have with the people we love and stop pressuring the people we love to conform to our idea of the perfect holiday.

Today is all we have and we never know who will be missing from the table next year and it might even be us.