Today is Christmas! Christmas is always one of my very favorite holidays of the year, and today was an especially good one. We had a great time with the family as we worshipped together, opened presents, and ate lots of great food. It was especially fun to watch Robby and his cousin enjoy the presents this afternoon.
I have thought quite a lot about the project today, I think in part because I've hit the two week mile mark. But, in particular today, I've been thinking about expectations. Christmas used to be something of a struggle for me. I used to see all of those beautifully wrapped presents under the tree and see much more than what was actually there. The presents would go on to ultimately reveal things like new clothes, new gadgets or toys, new books, etc. Sometimes I would love and be excited about the presents; sometimes the presents were inevitably something that I was not particularly fond of. Ultimately though, no matter how many presents I would get or how much I liked them all collectively, Christmas afternoon would usher in feelings of being let down.
The problem was that I wasn't really seeing the gift giving aspect of Christmas as a way for loved ones to express their appreciation of one another. I was seeing it as a potentially game changing day. Surely something under that tree was going to offer me an intangible ticket to something more, to more happiness, to a better life. Of course that never happened. As I've gotten older, I've learned to appreciate the gift exchange for what it is and to take pleasure in the giving as much as the receiving. I've learned that the gift exchanges are meant to be opportunities to show how much we care for and appreciate those whom we love and share our lives with.
This project, however, has interesting ramifications in terms of my struggle with gifts and expectations. On the one hand, the overarching and obvious goal of this project is to find ways to show how much I care for and appreciate Barney. And, I am doing it in a way so as to not build expectations for Barney at all. However, I definitely have expectations myself; I want this project to somehow be transformative of both my marriage and myself. Today though I've been thinking that if I persist in that style of thinking, the project will be crippled from the outset. I need to remember that what makes this project is its very simplicity. If there are larger outcomes than just finding a way to make Barney's day brighter each day, then that is amazing. But for now, I am just going to focus on the small goals.
p.s. You might have noticed that I didn't discuss my goal for today. Some things must stay between man and wife, so all I'm going to say is that I had a goal for today, and I was able to meet it.
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