Five Things Families Lose When Christmas Gets Too Complicated
- Glenn Fletcher
- Jul 8
- 3 min read
✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦
I want to tell you about the Christmas I almost ruined by trying too hard.
It was a few years into having four kids, which means it was the season when I was theoretically most experienced at Christmas parenting and practically most in danger of overcomplicating it. I had ideas. I had a list. I had ambitious plans for traditions and experiences and meaningful moments that would be remembered forever.
By December 20th, I was exhausted, slightly resentful of everything on the list, and so focused on executing the perfect Christmas that I had almost entirely stopped being present for the actual one.
My wife, who has better instincts about these things than I do, took the list out of my hands. Gently but firmly. And we had a quiet, simple, imperfect, genuinely wonderful Christmas instead.
I've been thinking about what families lose when Christmas gets too complicated ever since.
They Lose Presence
The first and most significant casualty of a complicated Christmas is presence.
Presence — genuine, unhurried, fully-here attention — is the thing children want most from their parents, at Christmas and every other time of year. It is also the thing most at risk in a holiday season that has been structured as a series of productions to execute.
When your mind is on the next thing, you're not in the current thing. And Christmas, lived from the inside, is entirely about the current thing. The look on a child's face. The warmth of a family gathered in the same room. The particular quiet of Christmas Eve when the anticipation is so thick you could breathe it.
All of that requires presence. And presence requires margin. And margin requires simplicity.
When Christmas is too complicated, presence is the first thing to go. And it's the thing that — when children are grown and the specific gifts have been long forgotten — they'll tell you they missed most.
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They Lose Meaning
The second casualty is meaning.
This seems counterintuitive. Most families complicate Christmas precisely because they're trying to make it more meaningful — more special, more memorable, more significant. They add traditions and experiences and carefully curated moments because they want their children to have a meaningful Christmas.
But meaning doesn't come from more. It comes from depth. And depth requires dwelling, which requires time, which requires simplicity.
The families I know who have the most genuinely meaningful Christmases tend to have fewer
traditions, not more. They've found the one or two things that are genuinely significant to them — a meal, a reading, a service, a practice — and they've given those things enough space and time and attention to actually mean something. Rather than rushing through twelve traditions on Christmas Eve, they linger in one.
That lingering is where meaning lives.
They Lose Connection — and Three More
The third casualty is connection between family members. When everyone is managing their section of the Christmas production, they are running parallel rather than together.
The fourth is spontaneity — the unexpected, unscripted moments that often become the most treasured memories. Over-structured Christmases crowd out the space where those moments happen.
The fifth is rest. Advent is, by its nature, a season of waiting — of deliberate, intentional slowing down in anticipation of something coming. A complicated Christmas inverts this entirely. Instead of slowing down to wait, families speed up to produce. And they arrive at Christmas Day already depleted, which means they can't fully receive what the day is offering.
The good news is that all five of these losses are recoverable. Simplicity is always available. The list can always be shortened. The production can always be paused.
The season doesn't require perfection. It requires presence. That's always been the point.
✦ MARK! The Herald Angel is a simple, meaningful, 64-page Christmas tradition you can read aloud in one evening. Available at MarkTheHerald.com.
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