Rudolph the Red Nosed Lockdown.

My wife’s favorite holiday tradition is to go back to Kansas City for Christmas to visit my family for a couple days. Then we stay at a schmancy hotel on the Country Club Plaza overlooking the incredible Christmas lights and do Christmassy stuff for a few more days.  A Little shopping, walking in the cold, nightcaps with friends by the epically ginormous fireplace in the hotel bar and prodigious wide spread merry making of all sorts. Kansas City and Parkville, MO, the safe harbor for all Christmas wonderment. Your very own living Hallmark movie!

So…

that ain’t happening this year. 

No travel, no schmancy hotel, no nothing. Rudolph The Red Nosed Lockdown. Little Drummer Boy… pa rum pum pum bummer.  Silent Night… you ain’t kidding. I could go on all day. Now, the plan is to bring that Christmas vibe into our home. We’ll make it look like a freaking Hallmark movie in the living room! I’ve gone a bit more Clark Griswold outside as well. I splurged a bit since we’re saving so much dough on plane tickets and hotel rooms and purchased a 6 foot tall inflatable Santa riding a polar bear for the roof (not kidding).

So, the other day I got out the ladder and the tools and went to work installing our little piece of holiday kitsch. The extra boost to pull us from the icey waters of the yuletide blues. Once it was strapped in place, secured tightly to the roof and plugged in, I fired up my new frosty friend. The inflation fans began to hum like tiny whispers of hope as Kris Kringle and his arctic steed began to rise silhouetting into the night sky like Gotham’s Batman spotlight but now just an old guy on a bear instead. The second my towering Christmas zephyr found it’s full shape my eyes and heart opened wider than they had in a while.

That seemingly inconsequential archetypal balloon having such an impact. I was knocked over with a feather. That holiday spark was ignited by an inflatable totem of vinyl and glue. I was reminded that fuzzy holiday feelings aren’t acquired through traveling to destinations that have the secret feel good recipe (although it doesn’t hurt) but they are remembered or created brand new, fresh out of the box by choice. The will to choose to be merry.  The lack of resistance to what we expect this time to be and to accept what this time truly is… which is perfect but different. Which is a lot like Santa riding a polar bear… perfect but different.

You don’t have to be a Christmas person to create a little more “merry” either. Like I said, it can be created out of thin air. You want peace? Be peace. You want love? Be love. You want merry? Be merry. We forget sometimes that it’s already here. Sometimes we just need a little reminder… or…a 6 foot Santa riding a polar bear.