Twas the night before the night before my daughter was arriving home from college for Thanksgiving break.

I left the office early to finish my workday from home because my 8-foot, artificial, pre-lit Costco Christmas tree was being shipped to my apartment building between 3 and 5 p.m. and I needed to meet the delivery guy in the lobby so he could wheel the giant box, on a dolly, up to my unit.

I guess if you had to conjure the diametrical opposite of a family piled in a station wagon, driving through a wintry dreamscape to a far-flung borough to select and procure the perfect tree around which to celebrate the season’s tidings, mugs of hot chocolate in tow, carols pouring forth through the speakers, it would be me meeting the Costco guy in my lobby.

“Sorry, can you actually wheel it all the way to that corner?” I asked when we got inside my apartment. “We’re not opening it until my daughter gets home from college.”

He obliged.

“We always do our tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving,” I continued.

(I overshare.)

He smiled politely. I thanked him. He left. I went back to my laptop.

For the next few days I walked by the decidedly unfestive box in the corner, festooned with packing tape and warning stickers. INGESTION HAZARD: THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS A BUTTON CELL OR COIN BATTERY. DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY CAN OCCUR IF INGESTED.

I indulged in some light nostalgia tinged with passing guilt.

We used to get a real tree. We used to pick it out at the same cute little lot every year. One year Santa was at the lot and he magically, astonishingly, wished my then-7-year-old son good luck on his upcoming math test and my son and I both looked at Santa, wide-eyed in utter bewilderment, and I knew that would not be the year I had to answer questions about Santa being real and I loved that Santa more than words could capture.

Anyway. We would always put up our real tree next to our fake pink tree, which we acquired (and I wrote about) when I got divorced the first time, when my kids were 2 and 6.

This year, I’m divorced a second time and my kids and I live in a building with an elevator and I’m not even sure you’re allowed to transport a real tree in it. Not that it matters, because there’s not a cell in my body that wants to haul a real tree and it’s rapidly shedding needles up an elevator.

So when my daughter started texting me links to fake Christmas trees in early November, I knew the assignment: Pick one. Have it in hand by Thanksgiving.

Done.

Still. The passing guilt. Surely, I tell myself, some seriously poor decision-making has led me to this moment, where I am, once again, asking my children to let go of past traditions and forgo storybook holidays and trust me (“just trust me, guys”) that the holidays will feel warm and joyful and loving—delightful, possibly!—even though they don’t look the way they did last year or the year before that or the 8 or 10 or whatever years before that.

But the guilt doesn’t stick around long. I’ve learned, over time, not to feed it.

Because the truth is, the holidays have felt warm and joyful and loving. Delightful, even. My kids wouldn’t have it any other way.

The first Christmas after my first divorce, we lived in a tiny condo with very little closet space. I rented a storage unit a few blocks away to keep a bunch of stuff I didn’t know where else to stash—kids’ artwork, suitcases, my Christmas decorations.

One cold, dark November evening I piled my kids in my car and we drove to the storage unit to retrieve the Christmas decorations and I felt, unbuckling my son from his booster seat, like an enormous, pathetic loser.

“My friends are probably making gingerbread houses with their children right now,” I thought. “All of them. There’s probably a gingerbread house-making party right now and I probably forgot to RSVP. I hope I wasn’t supposed to bring something.”

I died a little inside and then plastered a smile on my face and trudged us into the cavernous monstrosity known as Public Storage, with its cold fluorescent lighting and its cinder block hallways.

And then a crazy thing happened. My kids took off running and skipping and singing down those hallways and laughing at how their voices echoed and hiding behind corners and jumping out to scare each other and dissolving into laughter, again and again, and I chased behind them laughing and it was such a giant, healing gut check.

Because first of all, I had 9 million reasons to be grateful in that moment and absolutely zero to feel sorry for myself. Because second of all, my kids never, not one single time, gave me the impression that their joy, laughter or happiness were site-specific. Joy, laughter and happiness traveled with them. They made magic wherever you placed them. Because third of all, I hate making gingerbread houses. I mean, I really hate them. I have tried. They’re awful.

And I share all of this because I know that some of you can relate. Not to being divorced twice or leaving work early to let your tree in or having an epiphany at Public Storage, necessarily. (Although maybe!)

But to worrying that your holidays don’t look the way they’re supposed to. That you haven’t done what you needed to, what you should have, what you meant to, what you were expected to, to make them magical. Or that you did all those things and something terrible and out of your control sapped the magic out of them anyway. An illness, maybe. A death. Loss. Longing.

And I hope that you find a way to forgive yourself if you need to and give yourself grace when you can remember to and I hope you know that joy and laughter and happiness aren’t site-specific. Or tradition-specific. And they might not even be annual. They might not be possible some years.

But you’re worthy of them. We all are.

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