I used to think that it was really important to get special days *right*.  I wanted Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to be perfect.  And birthdays, especially birthdays, needed to be *just so*.

What I’ve found is that you are likely to set yourself up for disappointment if you load up everything into one day.  Something is bound to go wrong, or at least go differently than planned.  Packages are late.  People must cancel plans.  Stuff happens.

Now we extend celebrating out over several days.  We have “birthday week” instead of celebrating on one day.  If a package is late, it doesn’t matter, because we are still celebrating when it arrives (usually).  Christmas is a two-week-long holiday.

We even ended up extending out Easter this year by two weeks.  We had rain on Easter, and then it rained for several days after.  This really put a damper on our Easter egg hunt, which we usually set up in the yard.  Then we were busy the following weekend, and before we knew it two weeks had passed and we still had eggs full of candy to hide.

Manly Guy put together a note from the Easter Bunny, explaining the tardiness of the egg hunt.  It was really cute!  Needless to say, the kids didn’t mind at all.  They happily looked for eggs on a sunny Monday afternoon, and it had been long enough since they had binged on candy that they were excited to do it again.

I’ll never claim to be mellow (it just isn’t in my nature), but I must admit that celebrations are more enjoyable now that there is less pressure to have the “perfect day”.

Manly Guy’s note to the kids (as the Easter Bunny)