The Best Christmas Gift

Christmas shopping is not joyful for me. My wife does all of the shopping for our children, parents, family and friends. That just leaves me with the task of shopping for her, and this is almost too difficult for me to do.

This past Sunday afternoon was shopping day for me. And even though it ended well, the beginning of the afternoon was wrought with my usual anxiety and fear.

Perfectionism for some can lead to disability; to the point of no activity so a mistake cannot be made. This is how I feel when I shop for Mary Beth. She does so much to get Christmas here. The baking and decorating are impressive and her holiday spirit is contagious.

I want to give her a perfect Christmas – the right gifts in the right sizes and in the right colors without her wanting to return them for something she likes better. She deserves this. Anxiety keeps me from giving her what she deserves.

The anxiety attacks I experience while Christmas shopping are caused by the classic trigger - spin cycle. I’m triggered by the thought of not doing something right or perfect and then feeling incompetent afterwards.

I begin spinning which leads to panic and my inability to find gifts that express how much I love her. The catalyst for my trigger - spin cycle is rooted in a lie.

Not all of us have the same triggers because we each believe different lies about ourselves and our world. Here’s a quick story to illustrate this point. There once was a man and a woman who loved each other very much and had committed the rest of their lives to one another.

One Saturday afternoon the couple was running errands and found themselves in a drug store picking up the needed items for the week ahead. The woman walked by the men’s fragrance counter and suddenly found herself spinning with anxiety. She took her husband’s hand and asked if he still loved her and would never leave her. He provided the proper assurances and reminded her of the truth.

She realized after the spinning stopped a bottle of Old Spice © was the trigger. Her first boyfriend, her first love, used this brand. He broke her heart. The lie born from this experience made her believe she would be abandoned again because she was not worthy of being loved.

This woman is a friend of mine. She is a brave and courageous woman to be sure. Yet, to this day a bottle of that particular after shave can still cause those old tapes to begin playing in her head; no matter how hard she tries to shut them off and replace the lie with the truth. This is just a piece of her reality.

A piece of my reality is I’m triggered on the days when I do my Christmas shopping for my wife. The lie is I’m not a competent man.

In my mind, a competent man would know exactly what to get his wife. A competent man would know how to touch his wife’s soul with the perfect gift. A competent man would stride confidently into the department store and with surgical-like precision locate the gifts with ease, clarity and self-assurance.

Driving to the mall this past Sunday afternoon; the lie was again blaring in my head. With her handwritten list tucked in my jacket pocket, I still wasn’t feeling very competent. My trigger had been pulled and the spinning had begun.

After parking, I sat in my car for a few moments. I knew this feeling all to well. I had been there before. To stop the spinning, I asked, “What would a competent man do in this situation?”

The answer I heard was to go into the store and let my heart guide me through the jewelry cabinets, perfume displays and the racks of clothes. My heart told me I was now strong enough to extinguish the lie; if at least for one December afternoon, and replace it with the truth. My heart told me the point wasn’t to try to do it perfectly; the point was to do it for my wife.

My hope this Christmas morning is Mary Beth will not only receive the right gifts in the right colors and in the right sizes, but she will also understand how important and valuable she really is. Perhaps the best gift she will receive from me is my determination to keep growing and working on eliminating the lie from our lives and replace it with the truth. The truth never needs to be returned because it is always in the right color and in the right size.

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