A Truer Christmas

Have you made your list?
Not the surface-level version — the one that names what Christmas means to you at its foundation.
The one that asks: What do I want this season to be? What do I need? What do I hope for in the real, unedited truth of my life?
The one that shapes how you want to move through everything from food to gift-giving to gatherings to rest.

If you haven’t finished it, that’s okay.
If you need more time, me too.
But once you have even the beginnings of it, here comes the part that is both clarifying and confronting.

You have your wants and needs in front of you.
And coming at you?
Every demand the season knows how to throw.

The expectations arrive from all directions — family systems, workplace culture, social norms, faith communities, history, obligation, budgets, nostalgia, advertising, Hallmark mythology, generational patterns, and the silent pressure to “make it nice” for everyone else.

This is where your list becomes a tool of return.
You hold it up like a compass to the season’s noise.

This is the practice of coming home to your values.
You take every request — be here, attend this, host that, buy this, choose X over Y — and bring it back to your centre.
You consult your wants.
Your needs.
Your capacity.
Your truth.
Your sense of meaning.

Wayne Dyer’s line still stands:

“Consult your inner-truth barometer and resist the temptation to tell people only what they want to hear.”

But now we add this: consult it not once, but continually. Because Christmas is nothing if not a flood of opportunities to abandon yourself in the name of being agreeable.

Boundaries begin here — not as a set of rules, but as a way of honouring what is alive and tender and true in you.

Boundaries aren’t just about what you keep out; they’re also about what you intentionally let in.
You say no so that your yes means something.
You say yes to what brings life, even if it disrupts expectation.
You say not yet, so one day you can say here, fully.

The hard part is that boundaries become nearly impossible when we’re disconnected from what we want, what we need, or who we are trying to become. How can you know what to protect, nurture, or decline if you don’t know the shape of your centre?

And when I say “know,” I don’t mean fixed certainty.
I mean the shifting, living kind of knowing — a truth that moves as you move.
Everything alive is in motion.
Your desires, your needs, your capacity, your identity… all of it breathes, expands, contracts, transforms.

So let yourself be seasonal.
Let your boundaries be organic.
Let them change as you change.

Boundaries are not walls. They’re not fortresses. They’re not barbed-wire fences around your tenderness.
And truly — do you want to live barricaded from life?

Don’t you want an open heart?

I know that sounds risky. An open heart is porous — it can be filled with joy, wisdom, connection, and beauty… and it can be pierced by disappointment, betrayal, and pain.

But boundaries don’t exist to shield you from being human.
They exist to keep you rooted in reality, present in your life, awake in the moment.
Anything you call a boundary that removes you from connection, presence, or truth isn’t a boundary — it’s avoidance dressed up as self-protection.

Healthy boundaries don’t separate us from life; they connect us to it.
They allow us to seek support when we need it.
They help us distinguish between requests that bring us closer to what matters and those that drain us away from it.

Your list helps you build these boundaries — not to construct a fortress, but to craft a life.
A life that bends, moves, adapts, breathes.
A life where you feel more and more yourself, more and more here, more and more aligned with the quiet oneness threaded through everything.

Mark Nepo writes:

“When we keep choosing between right and wrong, we spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.”

So let’s be clear:
You’re not deciding which traditions are good or bad, right or wrong.
You’re practising truth — moment to moment — and aligning your choices with the life that wants to grow in you.

May you be here.
May you be true.

LISTEN:
Sit with one demand the season is placing on you. Ask:
Does this request bring me toward myself or away from myself?
Let that answer guide your next step.

Liz Milani, xo