Picture Perfect

The week of Thanksgiving is one of my favorite weeks of the year. There are very few things that bring me more joy than watching my children celebrate, and we intentionally fill the week with lots of special traditions and family fun. This year, we packed our week with a visit to the zoo, delicious family meals, cutting down and decorating our Christmas tree, and having our annual Hot Chocolate Party to welcome in the holiday season.

It was beautiful, and I got some lovely pictures of all the festivities, which I posted to social media. I love seeing pictures of other family’s holiday traditions, and I love sharing ours. I love documenting what happened and looking back on those times.

But I don’t want anyone to think that the pictures tell the whole story.

There are sweet pictures of my kids and their cousin at the zoo, all bundled in hats and gloves, rosy cheeks and brilliant smiles. There is no picture representing the long drive home, stuck in holiday traffic, with a screaming toddler.

There are pictures of a cheerful Christmas tree, all lit up, with kids in matching pajamas smiling in front of it. There’s no pictures representing the short tempers, crying kids, and marital tension when we couldn’t get the tree to stand up in its base or the lights to work.

And it’s all true. The smiles, the beautiful tree, the cozy warmth and joy that comes from being together as a family. The piles of dirty dishes and dirty laundry, the sibling bickering, the impatience and exhaustion. The happy and the hard, the beautiful and the messy, all of it is true and real.

I think that sometimes social media makes it hard to hold that both are true and both are normal, especially around the holidays. The holidays are a time when there are lots of lovely photo opportunities, lots of beautiful decorations and baking and happy, smiling family pictures. And the holidays are also a time that are very difficult for a lot of people. The pictures don’t show the financial stress, the family tensions, the room in the basement where all the miscellaneous junk gets piled up.

We need to remember that social media always only tells part of the story. There are good and rich and beautiful moments that can be captured. But there are also hard and messy parts of every family, and those things don’t show up in pictures.

Don’t buy into the lie that because things look good on social media they are perfect in real life. As human beings, we can hold space for joy and beauty as well as mess and hardship. It’s difficult work, and we often need to be reminded that both can exist at the same time, but we can hold both.

But screens cannot hold space for both the good and the hard, the beautiful and the messy. It’s beyond their limited capacity. Try and remember what social media can and cannot do. Try and remember that social media is a beautiful tool for keeping in touch with old friends, capturing moments, and sharing pieces of your life. But social media never accurately represents the totality of any person or family or even experience. It never tells the whole story.

Don’t use social media as a measure of what your home or family or holiday should look like. Don’t buy into the lie that a happy snapshot tells the whole story, that you’re the only person whose siblings can’t get along, whose kids don’t sleep when you travel, or whose five-year-old refuses to wear pants. You are not alone. Every perfect picture has a full context behind it that you don’t have access to. Don’t believe that a perfectly decorated house means the family who lives in that house never struggles or fights or faces fear or pain.

The holidays can be a good and rich and beautiful season of the year. They can also be brutal, painful, rough, and filled with tension. Often, they are both things. Let’s hold space for the complexity in a way that a screen never can. Let’s remember that a picture never tells the whole story.

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