What if this Christmas, you decided ahead of time that you wouldn’t be disappointed?

Not because everything will go perfectly — it won’t. But because you chose peace over perfection before the first present was opened. Before the in-laws arrived. Before the kids melted down at Mass.

In this episode, I teach you how to manage your holiday expectations so you can actually enjoy Christmas this year.

We talk about:
* The real reason Christmas is so disappointing for moms (it’s not what you think)
* How to decide ahead of time what kind of Christmas you want
* Managing expectations around gifts, family, and traditions
* Letting God fill the gaps where your plans fall short

If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
 Invite Someone to Christmas Mass: A Simple How-To
 Permission to Say No: You Don’t Have to Do It All
 Less Stress for the Holidays
 
If you’re tired of dreading the holidays and want to actually enjoy them — that shift starts with the tools we teach inside Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order. Come join us and have your most peaceful Christmas yet. catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart

And it’s funny because we say yes to a lot of it. We’re like, it’s good. And then we get to this week and we’re like, it’s not fine. And so today I want to talk about having a no disappointment Christmas so that you can be preparing for that. Because I think. Moms do so many things. And so often we get to Christmas and it feels disappointing.

And so I’m going to give you a couple of reasons why moms are often disappointed at Christmas and what we can do right now to prevent that. And then what we can do if disappointment shows up anyway. Alright.

So the first disappointment, I think that moms recognize is that the day before Christmas, they’re like, oh, I have to do everything. I have to clean the house. I have to make the dinner. I have to wrap all of the presents and it’s kind of an accumulation of the whole month, but then I think we just feel really sad about it on December 24th.

And we’re usually getting the kids ready for mass. And then if we want a photo, we know that we have to do that while everyone tells us they don’t want to do the photo. So the first disappointment comes even before Christmas, right before Christmas. Well, we just have this thought I have to do everything.

And it is hard. Imagine if you took one of your children, like my sweet little 12 year old Rosemary. And I just made her like, do all of those things. And I was like, listen, you can’t have any fun right now. You have to stay up late. You have to hurt your back by wrapping presence on the floor. It’s for Christmas, you know, it’s for the memories. It’s for the kids. Like I would never do that to her. And yet we do it to ourselves. And we just feel terrible about it.

And so, when I’m coaching women, I really show them that there’s really two possibilities. One is asking for help. You could just ask for help. You could say, husband, can you help me? Can you. wrap the presence? And then you just don’t give him any feedback about how he wraps those presents? None.

You just go thank you, you’re a prince. Or your kids, your kids could help you wrap some presents obviously they can’t wrap their own presence. Right. But you could like figure that out. She could ask for help. You could lower your standards, I guess there’s a third thing, you could lower your standards. All of us have this long list of things that we want to get done, but there’s a cutoff point where we’d be like, I don’t really need to do those last few things.

And then, the third option is to decide that you really do want to do it so badly that you are willing to do it. I think that it’s just important to you. No, one’s making you, you’re not under duress. You don’t need to do it, but that you want to do it.

And so on December 24th. Just decide. Do you want help? Do you want to? lower your bar? Or did you just want to go inside? It feels like going inside your body and being like, you know what Sterling. I like it when we dress up the kids and take the picture.

And of course they’re going to chirp about it. But we’re going to set up that tripod and we’re going to take that family picture. Can you just decide? If you know why you’re doing it and you feel good about it, you won’t feel disappointed about having to. do it. So that’s disappointment number one comes then.

I feel like there’s a flavor built into that, about how long it takes to put some Christmas presents together and we’re surprised about that. That’s most of a surprise. I don’t think we ended up feeling disappointed. I think we feel frustrated. So I don’t think disappointment comes up as much there. That’s like an asterix on the December 24th thing.

Okay? And then Christmas day. Same thing. You’re going to mass somewhere in here. I mean, people go at different times, but Christmas day there’s like cooking, maybe mass. Maybe we’re dressing up. Maybe we’re traveling. Presents, and so everything I said about the 24th can apply to the 25th as well. You could feel disappointed I’m doing it all on my own. But those same three things.

The next round of disappointment though comes when our kids open their gifts. And it is so difficult to go through the rhythm or role as a mom of cultivating presence, buying them, wrapping them, thinking about them, thinking about money, thinking about fairness, thinking about how they’re going to open them and what they’re going to do with them for the day. All of that. To then guess and give them things and then have them be disappointed.

So the second opportunity for disappointment is when the kids are disappointed was what you got them and then you feel disappointed. You feel so crushed. When that happens. I don’t know that there’s any way that we can avoid this.

With older kids I do have some comments. Like I remember when my daughter was getting out of the, you get fun toys phase. And like now I remember the year that she got a Kindle and I think she got like a Kindle and a stuffed animal. Like it wasn’t a bunch of things. And I said, I prepped her for that.

And she knew that’s what she was, getting and she wanted to get it. And I said, listen, let me tell you about getting older. I said the present thing is sometimes less sensational. But more satisfying and I explained that to her I said, it’s so fun to rip open six packages and the like, press the buttons on your truck that go beep, beep, beep, but then like play with it. That’s probably not the example I gave her.

But like children opening toys is very fun and it’s very different when you’re a tween and you open a Kindle, even though a Kindle is awesome. And so I just prepared her for that. I said, I just want you to prepare your heart. You’re going to feel this like, kind of let down a little bit and, you just have to sell yourself on how awesome it is to have a Kindle.

And how satisfying it is to have a Kindle, which she literally reads every day, like every day my kid holds that Kindle. And that’s the only way I think you could kind of avoid some disappointment is that you could prep kids in ways like that.

But sometimes you just get them something that they don’t like, or they really did think you were going to get them this other thing. And you didn’t and your kid is disappointed. Okay, and I want you to know. That you can watch your child have an experience. A painful, difficult experience, and you can feel empathy for them and you can be at peace at the same time.

You can just be like, yeah. My kid is disappointed right now that happens sometimes. We get disappointed. We get disappointed on our birthday. We get disappointed at Christmas. Sometimes the expectations are just built so high that even as adults, we get disappointed. Can you be okay watching your kid be disappointed? And. how do you want to react? What do you want to say?

I’m going to be a little bit bossy and I’m not usually, I don’t usually tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you what not to say is you should just be grateful for whatever you get. How does not modern day parenting, right?

Modern day parenting would be like, oh, I see that you’re really disappointed right now. And I totally get disappointed sometimes. How’s it feel good to be disappointed? We like validate and we sit with them.

And then the punchline may still be like, oh, but it’s amazing that we got presence on it’s amazingly, we’re here and so many people love you. Let’s find the thing that we do feel grateful for. Let’s find ways to be thankful. So that message is the same, but it’s not shaming them. Can you hear the difference?

So, can you watch your kid be disappointed? What are you going to tell yourself? Pick the thoughts already. Like, Hey mom, you did a great job. You love these kids. You’re not going to bat. I don’t know what the number is. You’re not going to win a hundred percent of the time and that’s okay. They need to learn how to be disappointed. Some of you still need to learn how to be disappointed. So that’s the second. Opportunity. That disappointment comes up.

The third one is around what you get for gifts. Okay, maybe you don’t get any gifts. Maybe your husband gives you something ridiculous. Maybe by your own gifts and you thought you would enjoy that and then you didn’t. Maybe your mom gives you something and pressures you to say that you love it. Like just something around gifts and feeling disappointment.

But honestly, the way that I told you to talk to the kid is the way that you can talk to yourself. Where you just be like, Hey. I see that you feel really disappointed right now. I’m sorry. I feel disappointed sometimes. It’s okay. I love you. What are the good things that happened today? And so don’t get to Christmas, not having thought about what you might be disappointed about.

Or how you want to speak to yourself when you are disappointed. And we always get to just decide that absolutely any present is given in love and we can receive love. So even if your husband gets you something just ridiculous that you wouldn’t like it all. You just feel like he loves me so much and he got me that gift.

And if he doesn’t get you anything, I guess I want to say like, does he never get you anything? And this has been five years in a row and you’re still just holding out hope that this is going to be the year that he gets you something. Like, either just tell him I want this. Or make peace with him, not giving you something. We’re not going to just sit around and hope that this is the year that he likes somehow figures it out. That’s just so unfair to him.

And so we can avoid disappointments sometimes in the present area by just being really straightforward about what we want or what we don’t want. Or we just choose to be really gracious and accept it as a gift of love, regardless of what the thing is.

Another opportunity for disappointment. And this is one that I often experience is that I’m just lonely. I don’t. We don’t get to see our family. It will just be our nuclear family and we won’t see anyone else in our family. And it just makes me sad and I feel disappointed that. We’re not together. That has been true for probably 10, 15 years.

And so I just, I sit with my feelings and. I feel disappointed. I just let it be sad. She process it. It’s okay. To be sad. You guys. It’s okay. To feel disappointment. Disappointment won’t kill you. But I’ll tell you what does kill us? Is not feeling our feelings. And having a bunch of unhealed wounds and trauma.

And pent up things and living with high levels of cortisol that breaks down our body’s early. It’s not good. We need to learn how to be at peace more. And we can be at peace with the feeling of disappointment. It was like, in the agony, in the garden when Jesus says, Lord let this cup pass from me. That’s his moment of just being like, I don’t really want this. I don’t like this right now.

But he was at peace with the situation. That’s how a negative feeling can exist with being at peace at the same time. Christmas is hard for you guys. You’ve heard me say that for how many years now? It’s not my favorite.

But, I enjoy it so much more by planning what I want. And putting me in it. Not just the kids, not just my husband. And then being okay these moments. I don’t remember a Christmas. Just in my mind, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen where one of my kids was really disappointed, but I remember a birthday. I remember a birthday where one of the kids was really disappointed and that was hard. Because we love him so much.

So with all of those moments, which of those are gonna apply to you, maybe some of them may be all of them. But the last thing that I really want you to do is I want you to put you somewhere on December 24th, December 25th or December 26th.

Okay. If you’re a marathon mom, and you’re going to three different houses and you’re doing the cookies and someone’s in the Nutcracker and like, whatever it is. If you’re just going to have a crazy 24th and 25th I would just tell my husband; I am going to leave the house for four hours on the 26th. I am just going to go sit at a bookstore. I’m going to write or sometimes it’s easier to say I need you to take the kids to your mom’s.

And I want four hours in the house by myself to sleep. That has never really worked very easily for us. But just put yourself somewhere. What do you need? Acknowledge that you’re doing this crazy Olympics. You know, Level activities and planning and cooking and wrapping and then give yourself something in the end. Or what can give yourself throughout.

Can you make yourself some tea? Can you put on the music that you like? How can you create some space for you? How can you love yourself through these days? Just make sure you are part of the Christmas plan. How can you make Christmas morning breakfast easier?

My husband and I really don’t exchange gifts very much. And so what are you like? I might buy myself a book and be like, as soon as presents are done, I’m going to read this book that I just got. That’s something I would do.

Make sure you show up somewhere. I see that moms are doing just a superhuman amount of work. It’s hard to be a mom but we can have conversations like this with each other. We can put ourselves in the calendar. We can anticipate and avoid disappointment where possible and process it if it shows up anyway.

I’m praying for you. We got this. A couple more weeks. We’re in the homestretch. I love you. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.