One less thing
an extremely short, urgent letter of recommendation
This holiday season, may I recommend doing One Less Thing?
I’d like to recommend this to myself first of all and also you. If you are also staring down a weekend — nay, 12 more days — of feeling extremely overbooked because there are a million little extras on your plate right now, like for example:
that one holiday thing that your friend bought tickets for when you said “sounds fun!” last month when you thought this time of year wouldn’t get to you this year
kid A’s holiday concert
kid B’s holiday thing that you just heard about so you’re not really even clear what it is but you’re trying to remember that you need to add it to the calendar while you finish a bunch of other stuff and
that you have to find fun, school-appropriate pajamas for even though they actually sleep in nothing but skivvies (and sometimes less)
A lot of other stuff that you can’t even track, you’re just mostly flying by the seat of your pants and checking your calendar every few hours to see if you’ve dropped the ball on something yet or still have 15 minutes to get there.
and I know I am forgetting something big and OH MY GOD right presents.
And it’s not like all the other normal stuff went away just because it’s the holidays. You still have to rinse the sauce OFF the noodles in order for a few of them to be ingested, and get everyone out the door and back in the door 4-6 hours later and wash, rinse and repeat with the kids, their clothes and their lunch boxes. Everything and nothing is an afterthought right now, probably most of all your own general physical and mental health.
Which brings us to the reason I’m writing this. I stopped in the midst of canceling a thing tomorrow (genius that I am!) to send out this hasty, urgent dispatch — YOU TOO COULD CANCEL SOMETHING THIS WEEKEND! The world will not stop. It’s possible the kids will not know, and if they do know and are upset, you could bribe them into feeling better with candy or movies or BOTH. Or whatever your kid goes for — do you have a Dollar Tree near you? That is our ultimate bribe, and dangling the promise of a run to Dollar Tree (pick anything you want!) has enabled us to achieve things like essential childhood vaccinations and learning how to swim.
Cancel something! I mean, if you want to you could even cancel EVERYTHING. But I bet you could apply some Coco Chanel logic to these next few weeks and just take away ONE thing (or one thing every day, or one thing every week). Just an idea. I’ll go first.
This is such excellent advice *and* just wanted to share that when my kids were smaller and loved the Dollar General, they called it The Dollar Cash Store 🤣
I agree with everything you said but, if your child A or B is performing in the holiday concert you must attend. And so must the godmother (ask me how I know). Hopefully not outside at say, The Grotto or the Zoo.