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Who's ready for the holidays? Not me...

I must admit that I am nowhere near ready for this holiday season.  I am a perpetual procrastinator when it comes to getting ready for the holidays.  It's not that I don't enjoy them.  It's that it takes so much work to get the house decorated, make the cookies, buy the presents, wrap the presents...and then clean up from all of it come January.

I'm going to be frank.  I love the holidays, but the holidays don't always love me.  They are a stress-filled time of the year with a lot of expectations.

I would love to be the Pinterest wife and mom who has time to make and decorate those adorable sugar cookies.  Yet, I'm happy to be the person who will order my already-decorated sugar cookies from the tasty bakery in town after I burned the first two batches I tried to make myself.

I would love to have a well-coordinated and decorated Christmas tree.  Yet, I'm happy to have three homemade preschool ornaments hanging on the same branch with all of the breakable (a.k.a., pretty) ornaments hanging at the top of the tree so that my children don't pull them off and toss them on the ground - literally shattering memories of Christmas past.

My decorations are grouped around my house in ways that the children don't destroy them. The presents that I have managed to buy are tossed in the back of my closet in the hopes that the children won't be able to find them past the layers of winter shoes that are stockpiled in front of them.  My floors are perpetually covered in pine needles instead of nicely vacuumed at all times of the day - leaving my almost one-year old also perpetually covered in pine needles.

I still have Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations up.  My laundry is covering every couch and chair because winter brings 10 times more laundry than the rest of the year and less time to fold it since I'm supposed to be getting ready for the holidays.

So, if you come to my house this holiday season, don't judge the pumpkin candle sitting next to the ice skating snowmen.  Try to avoid wearing socks that aren't easy to get pine needles out of.  And, feel free to sit on top of the laundry (it is *hopefully* clean, after all).

Most of all, let's give each other a little bit of grace this season.

Merry Christmas.  Happy Hanukkah. Happy New Year. And Happy Every Other Holiday this season. 

Don't judge my ice skating snowmen sitting next to my pumpkin candle...
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