Every day for what feels like the last two months, my 3-year-old has asked me the same question:

"Is today Christmas?"

He asks in a voice mixed with both excitement and dread, full of the expectation of a thrilling day but also the fear that, when it finally arrives, something may be required of him for which he's not entirely prepared.

Honestly, his attitude, a frappe of anticipation and anxiety, mirrors my own.

Pre-parenthood, the idea of holidays with kids was gentle, full of nostalgia for the sweet parts of my own childhood and amnesia for the harsher times. What I've realized as a parent is that the most common Christmas experience is bone-deep exhaustion.

It's list-making and planning, cooking and baking, gift-seeking and gift-buying — to say nothing of the wrapping. Then, there's the real grind: the constant, unremitting lying.

There are the fibs about Santa, of course, the invention of an entire backstory for whatever kind of person would move to a barren wasteland to live out his days in the company of several hundred tiny creatures just as strange as he is, toiling ceaselessly in the hopes of meeting, if only for one day, the material demands of billions of bratty kids.

There are the lies about the letters and how they arrive, the elves and the reindeer, the Grinch, Frosty the Snowman — by the time you're done, you've sewn a virtual quilt of fabrications.

"Do the elves ever die?"

"Can Santa see what I'm doing at Grandma's?"

"Does he eat cookies at every house?"

It's exhausting, frankly, and makes you realize how easily you'd crack under police interrogation.

This year, I also set myself a series of further obstacles to serenity: I decided to handmake presents and bake homemade treats.

"Fruitcake!" I thought a month ago. "What a great idea!"

When I found myself, a few weeks later, elbow-deep in pounds of dried fruit, the promise of weeks of tending to the cake with freshly sherried cheesecloth standing in front of me, the idea seemed mysteriously dumb — bizarre even.

"Who set this pointless task for me?" I asked myself, knowing full well that the answer was Pre-Holiday Me, a starry-eyed idiot.

Pre-Holiday Me also planned to make hot chocolate mix by hand, stuff it into tiny glass containers and cover them in squares of red tartan cloth cut by hand, tied with a jute-ribbon bow.

"How festive!" Pre-Holiday me thought. "How adorable!"

Holiday Me found the experience slightly less adorable as I peered through my reading glasses at the tiny tags I'd bought, my hands cramping as I wrote words small enough to make an ant squint.

Meanwhile, the demands of everyday life do not — no matter how much I might wish — pause, even for a second.

In a religion class years ago, I learned about the Buddhist concept of "samsara," the endless, miserable cycle of death and rebirth to which all nonenlightened humans are fated to endure.

Laundry, in other words.

It all sounds rather pathetic, and I know that it both could be and, for many people, is far worse. I'm cringing as I complain about having too much family, too many presents, too much food.

Still, I can't help but think of our toddler's conflicted holiday spirit.

When we ask him what he wants for Christmas, he mulls it over with a kind of confused wonder, marveling at the possibilities but also the peril.

"Nothing," he seems to say. "Everything."

Somehow, he already knows it's a mixed bag.

When the holiday finally comes, I expect that it will be with his mixture of relief and sadness that I answer him: "Yes, honey, today is Christmas. Thank God."

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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