My Love/Hate Relationship with the Christmas Season

Now, just to be clear, I absolutely love Christmas. Celebrating the birth of Jesus, the baby boy who changed all of history, including my own personal life - what could be better than that?! Also, three of my four pregnancies, I was pregnant at Christmas. I looked at Mary in a completely different way after the first one. I saw her fears and tried to imagine what she must have felt like. I know how overwhelmed I felt with each pregnancy and can only imagine how overwhelmed she must have felt. I love Christmas. I love the Christmas Eve service we have at our church. I love the Christmas decorations! I love the way my house looks decorated! I love all that Christmas means and all the different ways there is to celebrate it.

Okay, that being said...I hate the Christmas season! Now, I also understand that some of my hatred comes from working retail. I get to see so many people complain to me about things that I have no control over. People threaten never to shop my store anymore...um, okay...would you like directions to another store? Again, I would say 99.98% of the complaints are things I have no control over and no way to fix.
I hate dealing with Christmas decorations. I love the way it all looks, but I absolutely hate doing the decorating. Again, part of this comes from the fact that three of my children are 5 and under and can destroy anything that crosses their paths. I know it will get better. But for now, it's so stressful and not fun. For example, we pull all of the Christmas stuff out of the attic and Adam and I head down stairs to get the tree up. Everyone helped put the tree up (it has to be artificial this year because we are moving the day after Christmas - that's a whole other blog entry) but, while we were putting the lights on it, the kids went back upstairs. In the ten minutes we are putting the lights on, the two little ones proceeded to shred the styrofoam that our breakable Christmas decorations were in. Yes, it looked like it had snowed all over the room. So, while Adam finished the tree, the kids and I cleaned the room. I was furious by the time it was over. We are also keeping the decorations to a minimum this year since we are moving. So, when I come down from cleaning the room, I am met by Zoe, my nine year old, complaining that this wasn't going to be a good Christmas because we can't put lights on the outside of the house. I was trying to ignore her, which she was making very difficult. Then, Sebastian is crying because Adam won't give him scissors and let him cut paper. At this point, it's almost 8:00pm and I am about at the end of my rope. So we sent every one of them to bed at 8:00pm. I couldn't take it any more. Ahhhhhhh...decorating for Christmas...
So, that's my love/hate relationship with the Season!