Mama, have you ever felt disappointed by Christmas? The long hours spent shopping, wrapping, decorating, cooking, and then the big day comes and goes in a blur of busy. If you allow yourself to actually describe how you feel at the end of it all, it sometimes feels like something just didn’t turn out quite the way you pictured it when you planned it all. You may feel a bit disappointed and deflated. 

Sometimes, Christmas occurs during a crisis, like the time you spent that Christmas Eve in the hospital with pneumonia, or the year you faced an unexpected loss of a loved one the week of Christmas, or when a tsunami destroyed half your neighborhood the day after Christmas. But those “disappointments” (and in such cases, that isn’t a strong enough word) have clear, understandable reasons. At such times, we understand that the grief brought on by the crisis has colored what should have been a season of joy. We walk through the grief, we help our neighbors, we draw closer to our loved ones, and step-by-step, we accept the mix-and-mash of grief and joy that comes when hardships fall during the season when we celebrate the birth of the One who gave us eternal hope. Here, I’m not talking about these Christmases.

Today, I’m talking about the times when there were no major crises to handle, and it should have been a fun-filled day of delight, but it wasn’t. All the effort and money almost felt like a waste by the time the big day had come and gone. Why? What could be done differently to experience contentment and joy with the season that is Christmas?

It has been said that people overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can do in the long term. Let’s apply this thought to Christmas. The deepest joys of the Christmas season are too many and too intricate to be stuffed into one big day. Maybe the disappointment often felt at Christmas comes because we try to do in a day what actually takes a lifetime of Christmas seasons to accomplish.

We moms are juggling many valuable tasks: building family traditions, pointing our children to Christ, helping them learn to love the people around us, and making family memories of sheer joy. 

All of this can’t be done in a day, no matter how well prepared we are for that day.

Mini Celebrations

What if, instead of putting most of our efforts into preparing for one big fantastic celebration on December 25, we spent the month of December taking a few well-planned moments every day to soak in the season that brings “Joy to the World.” Would a series of small, daily, mini celebrations bring a deeper contentment with the holiday season? What would be the effect of making it a habit to daily reflect on the story of Emmanuel?

Would the experience of tiny and meaningful preparations take some of the pressure off the one “big day” and allow for a fuller experience of the season. What if this practice were repeated year after year? What if your family always took time throughout the whole month of December for Christmas fun, for delight, for learning and for reflection? What would the cumulative effect of years of intentional tiny celebrations be?

When you seek to learn a new language, it’s far more effective to spend a small amount of time practicing each day, than to cram hours of study into one session once every week or two. In a similar way, Christmas is better enjoyed in small daily moments throughout the season.

Where’d You Learn That? Homeschool has designed a Christmas Calendar Bundle for just this purpose. To help you have those daily mini-celebrations with your family. May you have a joy-filled Christmas season, and when you fall into bed at the end of the day on December 25, we know you may be tired. We know your feet make ache. But it is our hope that you will not reflect back on the day with disappointment, but rather with a content and thankful heart.