In all its celebration of the best, Christmas still has a way of exposing…reality.

Take last Wednesday. The goal: 12 canning jars of sand-art brownies for my kids’ teachers. And of course, to make a memory.

But as I’ve mentioned before, sometimes my memory-making can go a little differently than I saw it going in my head. In this case, I struggled to hear Pandora’s Christmas music above, oh, my children yelling at each other. (And, uh, me raising my voice back.) And my cries of “Don’t eat that! You don’t want to give your teachers the gift of sickness! Go wash your hands with soap!”