Obligation

Denys George Wells, Nursery Tea (1909)

This year, I didn’t make Christmas cookies.

It sounds trivial. I’m sure many people have never made Christmas cookies. But I have. Every year. For thirty-nine years.

There was no grand decision not to. The butter was out on the counter. I’d told the kids we would make them. The familiar plan was in place. But as the 24th unrolled, hour by hour, I did not feel like cookies.

So Santa got the star cookies I’d bought the day before. Fresh out of the package. And he enjoyed every bite.

My kids never said a thing. My husband didn’t notice. Eventually, I put the butter back in the fridge.

That was the moment that stayed with me. Not the cookies themselves, but how little happened when they didn’t.

On Christmas morning, my kids built an elaborate Hot Wheels track and staged a stuffed-animal picnic on the living room rug. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and wrote for the first time in months. Not lists. Not plans. Just sentences that didn’t need to turn into anything useful.

No Christmas morning cinnamon buns rose in the oven. The house smelled like nothing at all.

Later, when my calendar insisted it was time to pack for the long drive to Abuela’s the next morning, I ignored it and stayed on the couch reading—articles I’d saved and never touched, ideas I’d been carrying without room to think about them. I knew I was sabotaging our early-morning departure. I kept reading anyway.

None of it was dramatic. No one objected. No one praised me. And yet it felt like stepping out of a costume I didn’t realize I was still wearing.

The perfect holiday orchestrator. The everything-from-scratch mother. The one who holds it all together.

I had planned less this year. Or, more accurately, I had planned lighter. I left space for decisions to be made closer to the moment. If we’d visit Santa. If we’d check out a Christmas market. If we’d take a family photo. That space did something I didn’t expect: it exposed how much effort it had taken to keep everything seamless before.

As I try to build rituals with my kids—choosing and blending between Spanish and American traditions, between what I inherited and what is still forming—I keep circling the same question: where does ritual end and obligation begin?

I used to think obligation was easy to spot. It was the stuff I resented. The heavy shoulds. But it turns out obligation is quieter than that. It hides inside love. Inside wanting to give your children the kind of morning you remember.

I lost something when I didn’t bake those cookies.

I lost the comfort of replication—the belief that if I recreated my own childhood closely enough, the feeling would come with it. The safe feeling of those perfect holiday mornings, where food appeared as if by magic, gifts were wrapped just so, and stockings were impossibly full. Mornings where everything was taken care of before you even woke up.

But memories are fickle. And deep down, I know that underneath those perfect, cinnamon-scented holiday memories is something heavier. My exhausted, fried mother, still stuffing stockings at 2 am, only to be up at 5:30 am to get the cinnamon buns in the oven. The tension that buzzed beneath the perfection. The sense that care required depletion.

My mother gave me beautiful holidays. She also showed me a version of love that consumed her.

I don’t want to hand that model down. But I don’t yet know what replaces it.

On the 26th, as we loaded the car for the drive to Abuela’s house, my daughter asked if she could have a star cookie.

“Of course,” I said.

She smiled and devoured three.

I don’t know if she’ll remember the cookies I promised and then didn’t make. I don’t know what scent my kids will associate with the holidays in our home.

What I do know is this: the butter went back in the fridge. And for the first time, I didn’t apologize—to myself or anyone else—for putting it there.