Messes and Mishaps
A few years ago my son Kaden and I were shopping in Target during the holidays. I made the mistake of going down the aisle with the gingerbread house kits. My creativity is limited to writing, scrapbooking, and home design. Even still, a theme of "less is more" carries through those categories. Crafting is NOT my strong suit. Kaden studied the different choices of kits and turned his big, brown eyes on me as he asked, "Wouldn't it be fun to make a gingerbread train?" My brain said, "I think it might be more fun to walk across hot coals than make a gingerbread train." However, those eyes softened my heart and what I said was, "Absolutely! Let's do it!"
My oldest son Hunter cringed when he saw the kit sitting on the counter. "We're not putting that together, are we?" I was beginning to rethink my spur-of-the-moment decision.
We spread the ingredients on the counter along with the instructions. It seemed pretty straightforward. How hard could it be?
The answer, for us anyway, was very hard. The icing had a mind of its own. It just dripped down the gingerbread in globs instead of spreading a thin smooth line like the instructions indicated. Once, during the process, I licked my fingers. Big mistake! It tasted like glue! Unfortunately, it didn't work like glue. The pieces wouldn't stay together. The candies slid down the sides of the train. What a mess!
We finally finished. When I say finished, I only mean that we performed the last instruction and placed the last candy on the train. The train was a disaster. The sides were falling in. Globs of icing were everywhere. Candies kept falling off. It didn't even taste good. In addition to the frosting tasting like glue, the gingerbread tasted like cardboard, and the candy was stale.
I was so disappointed -- not for me, but for Kaden, who had been so excited to create this train. After a silent moment of standing back to look at our train, Kaden exclaimed, "It's perfect!" His face was a picture of pure joy.
To be clear, this is what he was looking at:
During this Christmas season, we can become overwhelmed trying to create a perfectly decorated house, a perfectly cooked meal with flawless presentation, or a perfectly picked out and wrapped present.
But it's all in our perspective, isn't it? Years later, Kaden still recalls how much fun it was to build that gingerbread train. In fact, most of our family's favorite Christmas memories involve some type of mishap, something that wasn't quite right: the time we looked at Christmas lights in freezing cold and windy weather, the Christmas tree with branches that drooped so much the ornaments kept falling off, the donut maker (the perfect gift) that my husband got one year which produced the nastiest donuts we've ever eaten, the sugar cookies we spent hours decorating that ended up tasting like straight flour.
Why not enjoy the mess and the mishaps this Christmas season? Perfection shouldn't be the goal. Making memories is what matters. And what memories seem to stand the test of time? The messes and mishaps, of course.
