Embracing: Beautiful Messes

By The Red Tent, November 21, 2014

There is a battery-operated singing Santa at our place whose addition to our family two weeks ago was greeted with one hell of a welcoming. He walks, too, which was obviously scary to begin with (He can’t bite me, Mummy?) but is now very funny to watch as Ella pins him to the ground, legs flailing about, the merry merry of his happy jingle filling the air around us.

Two weeks of continual jingles – continual – and I am quite ready to throw the jolly man in the bin, but I WILL NOT let him ruin my festive spirits, which just quietly are shooting to new all-time highs. I don’t want to be that crazy lady, but, well, I am. Elizabeth Gilbert reckons that we should embrace the beautiful messes that we are, though. She says that instead of torturing ourselves with that loaded word balance — that perfect ratio of faith to marriage to friendship to child rearing to hobbies to exercise to self-growth to household chores to Christmas involvement (okay, I made that last one up) — we should drop the pressure it puts on us altogether. No pie chart has those things all neatly sliced up, and to have BALANCE as a goal is just suicide anyway, she reckons. We are beautiful messes. Life is the greatest of beautiful messes. Which means I am hereby embracing my no-balance crazy lady Christmas alter ego. Kind of like Mrs Claus but with less calm and more hysteria, complete with a high bun and all.

Our Santa Express train made its debut yesterday, the kids bagging front row seats.

Turns out, the Santa Express as not as sleek and quiet as Santa himself on those executed chimney descents and Billy got, we’ll go with startled, when we turned it on. Ella comforted, he calmed down, and all was well in the magical Christmas world again.

Except for when I suggested we move it to our dining table because Billy (The Swiper) kept destroying the tracks.

“Rachel, we eat dinner at that table.”

Blank staring from me.

“What, we’re not going to eat now until Christmas is over?”

More staring.

“Oh my god, Rach. Seriously. Pull yourself together.”

I made a mental note not to tell him about the giant snowflake in the boot of the car. Or the fact that there were two of them.

A few pictures of a family shoot I did last weekend — which I will have you know I nearly cried at, but pulled myself together quick smart. (So proud, I know.) Amy is my longest-in-time friend, befriending one another in year ten. We’ve been through most things you could go through, and now I get to watch her mother, and fall in love with her baby boy like a sappy old aunt. I love her and her little family so much, and it was such an experience – being part of their lives in this way – capturing these fleeting moments in time for them to look back upon when they are 80, reminiscing about the time their very first baby arrived into their outstretched arms and made their worlds so much more lovely.