The holidays, that we are in the middle of at the time of writing this, are considered the most hectic and crazy times of the year. No matter if you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or even if you don’t celebrate any of those and celebrate someone’s birthday instead, it is always busy!

Everyone is everywhere trying to get everything that is needed for however many days have to be celebrated. For me, I celebrate Christmas. Christmas is celebrated over a span of two days, because we have Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas day dinner. Christmas Eve has always been our finger type foods and preparing the bigger meal for Christmas Day, which for me has always been lasagna.

That all takes a lot of time to prepare and get ready to even make. There is so much to do before making it and I watch my mom do all of that every single year.

But, that is just the meal. There is so much more than that to get done as well. There is always the decorating of the house for the holiday, picking the gifts for everyone, getting those gifts for everyone, and not forgetting anyone when you are getting gifts. When you get those gifts, you have to either go to the store or shop online. There are people who have to work hard to make sure you either get the right thing in the store or get the right thing sent to your house when you order something online. After that, there is always wrapping, labeling(most of the time), and making sure that the gifts get to everyone before Christmas. With getting the gifts to where they have to go, that usually means either driving or walking somewhere to deliver them, or even sending them through the mail to people far away. That brings a lot of work to the people who work in the mail companies and that shows why it is their busiest time of year.

Now, you might be sitting there wondering to yourself, why is this much happening all at once? Well, I have come to the conclusion that it is one of these two reasons, or a mix of the two.

One of those two reasons is that these holidays have standards now from either the media showing it this way or the family history of that holiday. There were always certain things that happen in the past when referring to family history, and sometimes there is someone in the family, usually in one of the older generations, that likes how things have always been. That thing usually sticks. On the other end of the spectrum, if no family traditions are really set, the media usually influences the way things go. We have all of these movies nowadays that air on television. They show these beautiful turkey dinners, the beautifully decorated living rooms, and the presents underneath the tree, all plentiful and neatly wrapped. With the media being presented especially the way it is today, people take the media and bring it to real life most of the time. Well, those movie sets do not set up themselves for filming! There is a lot of work that goes into those and that means there is a lot of work in store for someone looking into copying it.

The second reason I have is that people actually want to be kind to their families and to other people and make great memories with them. They want to make their celebration something of a decent size, so that it can be remembered in a good light. These are the people who want to see others smile with really good food or a really good gift! That is something really great, and I truly do love people like this!

Although, one thing that I want to say about all of this is that sometimes you do not have to go as big to make good memories or to be happy. Some people like things to be simpler. Yes, the really good meal is nice and the really good presents are nice, but as you probably have heard a lot before, the holiday time is truly about spending time with family and other people you care about.

Spend some time with those people, but do not worry about making everything absolutely perfect. The ones you care about will most likely just be happy to spend time together and be there with each other during this special time!