I decorated my Christmas tree yesterday. It's been up for weeks. It's artificial, and pre-lit. We have a two-story living room, and so years ago I decided I always wanted a really tall tree. It's easier (and costs less in the long run) to just buy one big fake tree than to try to find a 12' live tree every year, and then have to string it with lights. (I like a LOT of lights). I decided on purpose I wanted to put it up this year. (Last year, we just put up a small tree.) But then once it was up, I found myself kind of paralyzed about putting ornaments on it.
If you follow my foundation social media, you'll know I listen to and then pass along a lot of advice from mental health and grief experts. One key piece of advice I've definitely repeated this season (from Megan Devine of Refuge in Grief) is to do more of the things that make you feel better, and less of the things that make you feel worse. My original decision to put up the tree was because I thought it would make me feel better, that I would enjoy looking at it once it was done, and even enjoy hanging the ornaments on it. Of course a lot of those have memories attached to them.
And so as it turned out, decorating the tree made me feel both better and worse. We weren't as careful with the alignment of the different sections of the tree as it went up, and so there were some spots in the structure of it that looked bare, where branches weren't offset to fill the gaps the way they should have. So I thought, maybe we should try to do something about that before I hang all the ornaments. But then it's so heavy, there's not really a good way to fix it now that it's all fully assembled. Or what if the problem is that something got bent, or it's just wearing out and showing its years? My brain just went around and around, and the ornaments just sat there in boxes, as the days went by. I was disturbed by it. And then I was disturbed about being disturbed. And I couldn't move forward.
My husband gave me the option yesterday of just taking it down. Which was a sweet offer, since he could see how much it had been bothering me. But it's a hassle to assemble, and it was already put together, and there was still a part of me that thought it would ultimately be something that would add to my enjoyment of the holiday season.
As a recovering perfectionist, something I purposefully work on is the concept of "good enough." I choose to accept that whatever it is — this time, a Christmas tree with gaps in its silhouette — is good enough. And so (not saying there weren't tears shed over it) I went ahead. I closed the curtains behind it so the light from the window wouldn't shine through the gaps so brightly. And I covered it with ornaments: all my recent favorites, like the one from Hamilton, and the ones from our trips in the past couple years to the Grand Canyon and out to visit relatives in California; all the Hallmark Snow Buddies we've been collecting since 1998; a long-beloved wooden salmon and polar bear; a string of glass fish. We haven't gotten the big ladder out, so we couldn't reach to put the angel on top, and it's mostly bare of ornaments up there, too. But you know what? It's good enough.
I might have suspected this already, and I even said it above, but what I've learned for sure from decorating my Christmas tree this year is that sometimes the exact same thing can make you feel both better and worse. Life is hardly ever simple. Sometimes you make a decision and then you find it's best for you to change your mind even if it's inconvenient. Sometimes the momentum just carries you along and you muddle through. Take care of yourself this holiday season. Yourself and the ones you love. Remember you have agency to make the decisions that are best for you, and even to backtrack on them if you figure out that what's best now isn't the same as what it was when you first decided. Have grace. And I wish you all the joy that's possible for you right now. Merry Christmas.