Get On Board

I might as well have yelled, “Don’t you get this is magical?!” What I did do was let my right eyebrow arch halfway up my forehead and say, “Knock it off or I’m cancelling all of this.” 

Go me. 

I had this magical Polar Express Day planned with a train ticket and bells, an Oreo “gingerbread” house, the book and the movie, hot chocolate and a build-your-own train STEM activity from recyclables. 

We are making memories, damnit. Get on board (the Polar Express).

All he wanted to do was negotiate with me to watch A Very Monkey Christmas on Hulu and pick the marshmallows off the top of his hot chocolate.

After I got mad and guilted him into our forced fun, he did humor me the rest of the day. He later even admitted he didn’t want it to be over. So, you see, I was right, it was magical after all. 

Chris Van Allsburg, the author of The Polar Express said, “The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It’s also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older.”

Once I got over my indignance and quit mumbling words like “it’s never enough,” I began to see my part in it. I put so many outrageous expectations on Christmas. I want my kids to find magic in all of the things I found magical as a kid, instead of all the things they are finding magical right now. 

I want him to love the things I did, like The Polar Express (back in the days before the Polar Express had been completely exhausted) and Peter, Paul and Mary’s holiday album. But, he thinks that Rachel Isadora’s African-inspired Twelve Days Of Christmas and the Jackson 5 Christmas Album are the best things that ever came out of Christmas. (Seriously, go check out Rachel Isadora’s Twelve Days Of Christmas.)

Beckett will figure out his magic. And Oliver will figure out his own magic in a few years, and he will undoubtedly disappoint my expectations in his own way. I just need to step back and let their Christmas magic be theirs, because I can’t expect them to find it in the ways I did.

At the end of the day I want them to know how to sustain their magic. 

#polarexpress

#christmasexpectations

#badmomming