Bringing Heaven to Earth this Christmas

For me, Christmas is not about family. It used to be about Jesus – or so I thought. With a little self-reflection and introspection, I am able to admit now what Christmas means to me: Christmas is about indulging the romanticism of tradition and the idealism of the “perfect” holiday experience.

I was having a conversation with my husband the other day about how difficult it would be for me to have Christmas in Florida. My mom lives there now and I don’t know how she does it. How do you sing “Let it snow” and “walking in a winter wonderland” when it’s 80 degrees outside??! I struggle with happiness here in northern New Mexico when it’s Christmas Eve and 20 degrees out but there’s no snow. We lament -where is the snow? We want a white Christmas!!! And, yes, there is a part of me that looks at our beautiful tree and all the presents and the cookies and the lights and the magic of the holiday, yet feels disappointed and sad inside because the sun is shining.

How ridiculous is that?!?!?!

I am controlled by my expectations of what Christmas should be like, as curated over the decades by my romantic enneagram 4 personality, reading too many idealistic books, and watching too many Hallmark movies.

Christmas induces hope deep within me – not necessarily of the external miracles possible – but hope that this year, I will live out the Hallmark magic in my own life; that I will be the star of my own magical Christmas movie.

In a strange way, it reminds me of being a kid and how I used to feel the week leading up to the first day of school. Maybe if I wear this outfit, I will finally be seen as the cool, popular girl everyone wants to be friends with. Maybe this will be the year everyone sees who I really am.

Maybe this will be the year that it snows…

Especially after 2020 and how CoVid has changed our holiday celebrations, it’s obvious how many of us believe that circumstances determine our ability to have peace and be content. CoVid has demonstrated how awful we are at accepting events outside of our expectations. It’s nothing new that having expectations creates a lot of unnecessary emotional suffering. But what are the options? How do you NOT have expectations? How can you just accept the moment, the experience, for what it is?

To all the Jews who were anxiously awaiting a King and Messiah to rescue them from the Roman occupation, Jesus said, “The kingdom of Heaven is here.”

He wasn’t looking around at the soldiers on the corners and the council decrees, saying that these circumstances were ideal or welcome or satisfying. He wasn’t saying that the kingdom of Heaven was the literal experience we could see with our eyes and touch with our hands. In fact, he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to kings, landowners, farmers, seed-sowers, mustard seeds, treasures, a man on a journey, virgins, merchants, and a fishing net. He said the Kingdom of Heaven could be found within the everyday, ordinary life experiences and circumstances.

So then, what is the secret?

For me, the secret these days has been staying present, staying aware of my deeper self – not my thoughts or my feelings or my body, but the deeper self – and not letting my mind project and predict into the future or linger unnecessarily on the past. I stay in this moment. I don’t mean that I am hyper-tuned into what is happening, but I am not looking for a way to escape the moment. I’m not demanding or expecting that the moment be any different than it is. What’s fascinating to me about this approach is that there is a weird peace that comes with just accepting the moment for what it is, accepting that I am here. I exist.

Too often, we want something, ANYTHING, to take us out of a moment, or, alternately, we are so caught up in thinking about the future or the past that we don’t even realize we are IN a moment. According to our thoughts and feelings, and maybe even our body, we are actually “in” a future or past experience.

Think about daydreaming: Your mind has drifted off to a past/future enjoyable experience and you are so fully into that daydream that you don’t realize when someone is calling your name or speaking to you. You have “lost yourself” to that past/future moment, and the “now” might as well not exist. We can easily live our lives as though everything is such a daydream. I know this because it’s what I’ve done for nearly my entire life. 99% of my waking hours were spent with my mind pogo-ing back and forth between past and future, between expectation and disappointment, between hope and fear, in even the subtlest ways.

I’m beginning to think that Jesus said “the Kingdom of Heaven is here” because there is literally nowhere else it could possibly be!

The past no longer exists.

The future hasn’t occurred yet.

This moment you are in, right now, where you are alive and existing and being, is the only moment there is… for you.

You are not able to experience any moment other than the one you are in right now.

Sure, you can change that moment with action, but we are all just moving from moment to moment to moment. The important thing, the challenging thing, is to stay aware of that.

My education on this began the hard way – with my dad dying of pancreatic cancer when I was 25. It was a harsh introduction to the realization that nothing in life is guaranteed. He spent so much of his life wishing he were somewhere else. He hated where we lived, didn’t like his job, struggled with happiness. When he and my mom finally found the courage to begin traveling and visiting those places he had been talking about for decades, his diagnosis was only 3 months away. It felt so unfair.

I don’t think my dad would have waited so long to leave our hometown had he known cancer was coming. The future life he was always longing for did not allow for that possibility.

We cannot predict the future, yet we live so much of our lives there. At Christmas, we think about upcoming events or gatherings with dread to the point of making ourselves miserable hours or days before it happens. We fret about our children missing out without having any idea whatsoever about what they will or won’t remember about this holiday. We stress ourselves out with meeting the expectations of others without stopping to ask what WE really want or need. We fear the repercussions of not doing something and believe that we can predict the painful outcome.

We cannot predict the future, yet we fill it with hopes and expectations (both positive and negative), believing that we somehow have the ability to control and predict any of it.

The more I attach myself to the idea that a perfect Christmas requires snow, the more disappointed and annoyed I’ll be when it doesn’t snow. Yet, it’s my own expectation that sets me up for disappointment each time.

I’m choosing to rest in the moment this Christmas. It doesn’t mean that I don’t make plans and schedule the fun and buy the gifts. I don’t ignore the future. But I hold all of these plans loosely. I recognize them for what they are, what they represent: one possible outcome of the future.

Recently, a woman told me a story of how her daughter asked for a new hairbrush for her birthday. The girl knew her family had experienced some big changes and so she had humbly just asked for a $20 hairbrush. The woman was giddy with her storytelling because she knew that her daughter was getting a new ipad.

When we clutter our lives with our interpretations of our past and our expectations for the future, we limit the joy available to us, we establish the boundaries of our own Heaven.

Today, I encourage you to think about this holiday season – what your plans are, what you’re dreading, what you’re looking forward to, what you’re hoping for. Lay these all out in your mind and acknowledge that your interpretation of them, your predictions for them, are just one possible outcome. They are not guaranteed. They are not for sure.

That family dinner you’re dreading? It could be cancelled at the last minute. That gift you’ve been wanting? Maybe there is something else under the tree that will really thrill your heart. The guilt you feel for not doing Christmas cards this year? Maybe it will offer grace and freedom to another who is overwhelmed with all the things she thinks she needs to do. You have no idea what the future holds. Stop assuming that you do! Hold the future loosely, recognizing that your mind can only come up with a few basic outcomes, compared to the infinite possibilities there are. Stay in the awareness that this moment is really the only one you have. This moment where you ARE.

None of us can go back and change the past and none of us can predict the future. But we can embrace the now, and surrender to the moments presented to us by not requiring them to be anything other than what they are. It’s uncomfortable at first because we are so used to dreaming of all the other ways we might want them to be. But I am learning that acceptance is where the love is.

So, when you notice your thoughts and energy drifting back to the past or projecting into the future, simply pause and say “I am ok in this moment.” Sometimes it’s even helpful to reassure yourself and say, “In this moment, I am safe.” Meaning that you can emotionally and mentally survive whatever experience you’re having. I will also often say “In this moment, there are no problems.” This is not gaslighting or lying or spiritual bypassing. It’s not saying that everything is hunky-dory. It’s simply a way of calling you back to the moment you are *actually* in and helping us realize that most of our problems are experienced in our head far before they actually become a problem we have to deal with (if we ever even have to deal with it!)

Right now, I’m still hoping for a white Christmas. I always wanted to live somewhere where it snowed and now I do, yet the weather experts are expecting it to be a fairly dry season. I still have that idealistic, romantic girl in me that will feel sad and a bit disappointed if another year goes by without the magic of waking to a winter wonderland outside. The difference is that now I recognize that I’m creating my own drama, I’m choosing my own suffering. But, secretly, I kind of like it. Ha! Sometimes I like to indulge in this romantic Hallmark fantasy, even if it’s unlikely to come true.

What I’m aware of is that I am here to do it. I am here to enjoy these moments presented to me, even the fantastical ones. All of this is part of the experience of what it is to be me in this world. And when I sit down and look at the circumstances around me, I feel deeply aware that I am here, experiencing all of this. It doesn’t necessarily feel like the pearly-gated, praise-hands-raised afterlife I was taught to desire, but there is something about it that seems an awful lot like Heaven.