The holidays have a way of turning up the volume on everything. Joy feels brighter. Disappointment lands harder. Expectations hum in the background (sometimes louder than we realize) and then something shifts and we feel it: the quick rise, the sudden drop. Suddenly, it’s an emotional rollercoaster. This year, that shift showed up in my life as a series of holiday plans, revisions, and re-revisions.

The original plan, made optimistically mid-year, had the entire family in Colorado for Christmas. On Christmas Day. Woo hoo! Holy cow, this is actually going to work out this year. My mama heart is full.

At Thanksgiving, it was clear that schedules and timing weren’t lining up the way we’d hoped. Work commitments, new jobs, and the realities of travel made being together on Christmas Day unworkable. Oofta. A few tears. Ok, pivot!

We’ll be in Kansas the weekend before; let’s do Christmas then, in our Airbnb in Hays. Maybe not a perfect setting, but worth it so we can all be together. The weekend removes work constraints. I can bring a mini tree to decorate. Alright! We’ve got a new plan. And then geography stepped in. New York is very far from Kansas, and the math of finishing work Friday evening and a gathering on Sunday morning plus a 22-hour cross-country drive just didn’t leave enough margin for safety. Ok, pivot!

A flight from NYC to Denver after work on Friday, arriving at the same time as the one coming from Phoenix. A shared family drive to Hays on Saturday. The return trip to NYC to complete the cross-country drive to be figured out later. Not elegant, but workable. Then airline travel plans started misbehaving. The flight from Phoenix was canceled; the flight from NYC massively delayed. It was the kind of travel chaos that feels inevitable once it begins. Ok, pivot!

Reschedule the canceled flight to earlier in the day. Add a midnight airport run to pick up the second kid. We can still leave to make the drive by noon Saturday with enough sleep and without too much stress. Plan to make dinner in Hays once everyone arrives. Stack the logistics carefully. Oh, and we need to run a few errands on the way out of town. Hmm. We aren’t going to arrive in time to cook dinner. Ok, pivot!

As long as we all made it before bedtime, we’d call it a win. Christmas morning is still happening in the Airbnb. And then illness entered the chat. A positive Influenza A test. A few hours of back-and-forth discussion: maybe we can make this work with N95 masks if you feel ok. But darn it, you don’t feel ok. We called it; no need to travel while feeling crappy. Ok, pivot!

Thanks to a well-timed drive by family already heading the right direction at the right time, gifts moved cities, plans reshuffled again, and Christmas unfolded in chapters instead of a single shared morning: chapter one in the Airbnb, chapter two with extended family, and chapter three over video once the gifts arrived.

If you’re measuring a holiday by whether everything went according to plan, this one might look like a miss. It wasn’t picture-perfect. It held several rollercoaster moments and oh-so-many pivots. If, however, you’re measuring it by connection, flexibility, and showing up for one another, it was one for the record books. And I’ll choose those kind of wins every time.