Christmas perfection became my way of solidifying my American identity

During those teen years, our home was a far cry from the harmonious family I yearned for. My mother and I were in an almost constant state of battle. She thought the ideal Iranian woman should be modest, proper and slender. But I was none of those things. Instead, I was bold, loud, rambunctious and always ready to fight for what I thought was unjust in my world. These qualities felt wrong in my house but right in my American life. Yet another reason I wanted everything my new country had to offer, including its joyful Christmas spirit. 

Decades later, during the first Christmas with my Midwestern husband’s family, I finally got to experience a version of the holiday I had fantasized about growing up. A house filled with every decoration you can imagine, the smell of freshly baked treats, and holiday songs playing in the background as my in-laws sat with piping hot mugs of hot chocolate by a fire, where our stuffed embroidered stockings were hanging, including mine, the latest addition. 

So, when I became a mother, I knew I had to give this Christmas fantasy to my children. I baked and iced dozens of cookies shaped like Christmas trees, Santa hats and snowflakes, and I decorated every corner of the house with wreaths and bows and cheesy holiday signs — Santa this way! — and dressed the tree from top to bottom with ornaments. But somehow it didn’t feel right — it felt like I was pretending, donning some costume instead of something authentically my own.  

Year after year, I’d drive my husband and kids crazy with demands of matching holiday pajamas, hollering at everyone to get into the right poses and smiles for the Christmas card, and blasting old-timey music while criticizing everyone’s ornament placement. “You’re bunching them up! Let me do it!” I’d yell. It was all in an effort to bring to life a Hallmark illusion. 

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Then a few years ago, as we were playing Monopoly — another tradition I’d insisted upon because I played it as a teen and thought of it as quintessentially American — my preteen boys stopped the game. They both said that they were sick of these forced family traditions. They told me that every year I would promise not to micromanage the holiday, including our game night, but I still did it, and it wasn’t fun for them anymore. After their declaration, they darted off to their rooms. That night, I sat crying on the living room floor. 

“I’m failing,” I told my husband. “I can’t make the perfect Christmases your mom made for you. Like we should have.” 

As he put his arms around my shoulders, he said,“What are you talking about? I didn’t have perfect Christmases. We had fights and issues like everyone else. We don’t need all this stuff.”

I thought the better I made Christmas, the more American I would feel. 

Looking at my husband’s tired eyes, our crooked tree and our half-eaten gingerbread house, I realized what I was striving for didn’t exist. It was the dream of a lonely immigrant kid who desperately wanted to belong to something. But now I didn’t need it anymore to feel like I was enough — enough of an American, of a wife, of a mother. The next day, I released my family from the pressure of having to make the right holiday memories. No more posing for pictures, mandatory game nights or matching sweaters. We were all freed from my holiday mania and allowed to enjoy a messy relaxing vacation together.  

Christmas, especially for secular or non-Christian people, can feel like an out-of-reach magical thing, an all-encompassing happiness machine. So, it’s no surprise that many of us desperately want to be part of it. We think if we enter its fairy-tale-like wonder, we’ll fully belong to our country’s primary holiday custom. But creating a perfect Christmas — a manufactured idea tied to our national identity through movies and TV— will not make you belong more or less to America.