How To Have A Perfectly Imperfect Christmas

0:00 I'm dr. Vanessa Lapointe and this is my keys it and we're gonna chat to you today a little bit about Christmas time and the holiday season and all the fun that can come with that Oh garlic don't we look forward to Christmas like oh my goodness it looks like it's this one special day that we can absolutely show how much we love our children our families and we often have big plans and we get everybody together and oh it

0:28 sounds fabulous but I'm just gonna let you in on a little secret that sometimes it goes a bit crappy and sometimes that's because we've got to have in our house people who we yeah we're related too but we might not like we've also got excited children and excited children our golly they don't want to sleep because they're so so excited they they get really really but more prone to meltdowns oh my gosh we have spectacular mountain and that's

0:57 before all the sugar and then on the morning they get up so Wow early or won't go to sleep oh my god all of that adds to people being a little bit picky and then on top of that sometimes our expectations about the meal we're going to have can be a little too unrealistic so if you've got young children and you're planning to cook the turkey and the ham and the whole lung and the bells and the whistles and have the table look

1:20 like one of those in a magazine I'm going to tell you it ain't gonna work it is not gonna work because your kids are going to be hungry two hours before you get the food on the table and gonna be really crabby and you haven't got anything they can eat so I want you to be realistic that Christmas is sometimes a really stressful time I want you to look for the pockets of joy and delight not the full day of joy and delight

1:42 because I'm a realist mm-hmm and it is all about being realistic with our expectations and being realistic with the way that we approach all of the things around Christmas including gift-giving because sometimes we as the big people can go a little overboard with the gift giving to our littles and actually rather than being something really positive for them that they love it becomes overwhelming to them and it might be sending messages that really we don't want to be

2:12 sending to our children so I would just encourage you as you think about what works for your family and what's right for your children to really be thinking about whose need are you feeling if you find that you're getting a bit excessive in the amount of gifts or the amount of money that you're spending on gifts because really if that's meeting our own need to try and give our children the childhood that we didn't get or to have

2:38 them feel like they live in the land of plenty if we didn't come from the land of plenty then we're really not serving our children by falling into that hole so just try to find some realistic ways to flow into gift-giving and Christmastime all of the holidays really are all about the perfect imperfection so go for traditions go for the things that are going to bond you together as a family those are the things that your

3:05 children are going to talk about when their parents and they have littles in the world and so LANs there be realistic go for what's sort of the tradition the thing that's going to bind your family together and all of its perfectly imperfect I still think my boys say every Christmas they're old now they're in their 30s that if the tree doesn't fall over at least once before Christmas it ain't Christmas that's right happy holidays