Overdoing It

It happens every year. I make a list of gifts I want to get for the girls for Christmas. I make a list for Tom, my mom, my brothers, my step-dad and my dad.

I don’t have to make a list for Tom’s older kids because we always know what we’re getting them and I do that shopping separate from everyone else.

Then I go shopping.

And then I go again.

And again.

And by this point, five days before Christmas, I feel like I’m done, I’m ready. Except, I’m not. I haven’t wrapped a single gift for the girls. I have wrapped every gift for the older kids and their kids. I’ve also wrapped the teachers’ gifts and the gifts for the bus drivers as well as one for my mom. But everything else is waiting in the trunk of my car to be wrapped.

Yet I still wonder if there are one or two other things I should have gotten.

The plan is to take everything into the house tomorrow evening after the girls are asleep and put into appropriate piles, making sure there’s equality. That will give me Saturday and even Sunday if I need to get just one more thing.

I feel like we overdo Christmas every year. We make it more about presents than about Christ and family and love and togetherness.

Yet I don’t know how to stop doing it this way.

We’re very lucky that we can give what we do, that we have a home and healthy children. We’re lucky in so many ways and I want to remind my girls of that in ways that don’t involve sparkly paper covering Barbie movies and princess dolls.

Could this be a resolution in the making? Perhaps.