My blog is fixed! It was broken for weeks, and I could not bring myself to even begin investigating the situation. I have this blog because I want to write, not because I care about encryption protocols! A ten-minute chat with Bluehost tech support solved the issue. If only I had done this weeks ago.

Now I can write about my efforts to de-Grinch-ify myself this Christmas season.

I have been crabby about Christmas since approximately 2014. This was my second Christmas as a pregnant lady, and this time I was also a tired stay-at-home mom of a toddler as well. I was overwhelmed and anxious about adding a baby into the mix, and Christmas just felt like too much that year. My husband had been wanting to get a Christmas tree, and I was staunchly opposed to this. I could see into the future: me, leaking blood and milk everywhere, trying to put ornaments away while simultaneously holding a baby and yelling at the toddler not to touch anything.

No, thank you. Giving birth is enough for one month. I cannot possibly get Christmas put up and then put away as well.

But then my mom came to visit, and added to the chorus of tree requests and we ended up with a beautiful, live Christmas tree in our living room. I am still–almost eleven years later–resentful of this.

Christmas for the last decade has only represented obligation and unobtainable standards for me as a parent, as a wife, as a daughter, in all ways. It is a massive time suck, and causes stress for the entire month of December. It has made me resentful of my children and my spouse and my extended families and friends.

After years of loving Christmas, I just hated it.

And then two things happened last Christmas:

1. A coworker who I like but am not particularly close to gave me a small gift. It was just a candy tin with a little bow and my name on it. She gave them to many people in the school. But the candy was delicious, the tin was adorable, and the gift was entirely unexpected. I felt appreciated. I felt surprised. I felt seen. I felt… the Christmas spirit?
2. We went to a Christmas display in the next neighborhood over. A local man has saved some old Christmas window displays from a long-gone department store. He is slowly refurbishing them and exhibits them at his home during the Christmas season. I am not from around here, I have no emotional connection to these window displays, but we went to see them and let me tell you I have never felt the Christmas spirit so strongly as I did that night. The air was electric with joy, nostalgia, delight, appreciation. This man is bringing so much joy to so many people, just because. I felt… moved?

I don’t want to be the Grinch on the hill, angry about Christmas and other people’s happiness. I want to be Ebenezer Scrooge singing and twirling my way down a cobblestone street with a small parade of Muppets behind me and a Christmas turkey for the Cratchits under my arm.

So I am making some changes to our Christmas programming this year. There is so much that I do love about Christmas (the lights! baking cookies! doing puzzles! Christmas music! Christmas movies!) and really only one thing that I hate about Christmas. It seems over the years I have allowed that one thing I passionately hate to contaminate the things I do like.

I hate buying gifts. I hate it so much. It takes a massive amount of time and money. I am never satisfied with what I’ve purchased, and always feel that I have disappointed everyone with my lackluster gift-giving. The list of people to buy for grows every year, unending. And while I do not consider myself the moral police on this matter, I do think we all just have way too much stuff. All of us. And we get too much stuff every Christmas. I know it’s terrible, but I think I am opposed to the idea of gift-giving at its very core.

(An aside: I do realize it’s ridiculous for me to be so opposed to gift-giving when I listed the receiving of an unexpected consumable gift as a moment of Christmas spirit above. But I think the key for me is in the two adjectives: unexpected and consumable.)

This year I am doing the minimum of gift shopping. I sat down yesterday and made a list of people I want to buy gifts for and ended up with thirteen names. I have to ask my youngest if he wants to get a gift for his classroom teacher, so that will bring us up to fourteen if he does. But those fourteen names are it, the end. Some of those names have children attached to them and in theory I should be getting gifts for those generations as well. But you know what? Just because I have been buying a gift for your mom for the last twenty years doesn’t mean that I am obligated to give you one too. Let the more generous among us enjoy that strategy, it is not for me.

So here I go, hopefully embarking on a Christmas season with a little more joy and a little less stress, and better memories for my kids in which I am a Muppet delight to be around and not a fucking monster.