For years I’ve spent December after December determinedly struggling to bring some of the ubiquitous holiday spirit to my house. I’ve tried to bake sugar cookies and play Christmas music and fill my house with pine-needle-y tree branches, but despite my best efforts, it always feels forced and awkward. In fact, my attempts at holiday cheer consistently remind me of the tragic months that followed my decision to get bangs in seventh grade. They worked on other people, but I looked like a paler Dora the Explorer with braces. That is the level of awkwardness that fills my house as soon as illuminated reindeer start appearing on front lawns.

I’m not sure why I can’t pull off the whole “holiday spirit” concept. Maybe spending my first three Christmases in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas is a summer holiday celebrated on the beach, inhibited my early developmental stages of holiday spirit. Maybe there’s a genetic component that I inherited from my mother, whose general Grinchiness extends past Christmas to most holidays and birthdays. Mostly, I think my difficulty to enjoy the holiday season stems from a mass of horrendous Christmas memories that have accumulated over the years.

Out of the saga of depressing Christmas stories, one tends to stand out as especially symbolic of my family’s holiday struggle: The Christmas Shrub Incident.

The first year my family moved into our new house, our holiday spirit hit an all-time low. My twelve-year-old sister had finally figured out the truth about Santa Claus (only late by around six years), my dad was spending the holiday with his girlfriend’s family, and there was no logical place for a Christmas tree in our new living room. After forcing ourselves to pick out a tree, asking our new neighbors to help carry it inside, and struggling to set it up; we played the Messiah, the only Christmas music my mother likes, while unpacking boxes of ornaments that no longer matched our furniture. Our tree had no place for a star, so we hung it haphazardly on the side. By Christmas Eve, our mismatched tree leaned precariously to the left. Unwilling to deal with the pine-needle-y mess surrounding the tree stand, we ignored the slight tilt. When we returned from our traditionally uncomfortable Christmas Eve family dinner, our dog was frantically whining, his teeth chattering as he sprinted in circles with his tail between his legs. We walked into the living room to see our awkward tree on the ground, surrounded by shattered ornaments and puddles of water still dripping from the tree stand. My mother and sister immediately started crying as we started to pick up the glass. After an hour of cleaning, we pushed the fallen tree up against the couch, declaring it a “Christmas shrub.”

The Christmas Shrub Incident marked the turning point in my philosophy on holiday spirit. I finally understood that regardless of how many batches of cookies we burned or how many times we played Michael Bublé’s holiday album, my family would never successfully recreate the picture-perfect Christmas morning scene I always wanted. However, it wasn’t our holiday handicap that made Christmas so depressing; it was my unrealistic expectation. Having a horizontal tree only felt like a failure because we expected a perfectly ornamented vertical one. It finally made sense why my dog was the only one who enjoyed Christmas morning; he was the only one who hadn’t internalized the standard set by holiday movies, books, and commercials that made me expect a Christmas Day straight out of Love Actually or A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This year, my family decided to fully abandon our struggle for holiday spirit, choosing instead to flee the continent for two weeks and to donate a llama through Heifer International in the place of Christmas presents. Although the point of spending Christmas in Argentina is to avoid our annual holiday depression, not spending Christmas at home has made me realize all of the little traditions that we do enjoy, like seeing my dog’s face as the number of new toys in his stocking start to overwhelm him, or hearing my grandmother say it’s “time to pack up the sleigh,” when my grandparents move on to the next house of grandchildren.

Corny as it is, I’ve realized that although we aren’t good at sipping hot chocolate around fireplaces, wrapping presents, or decorating banisters, we’re excellent at celebrating our own breed of holiday cheer– one that involves donated livestock, rock-hard, gluten-free cookies, and sideways trees. I’ll probably always be a bit bitter that my family can’t pull off a functional Christmas, but I’ve learned to cherish our own quirky version of holiday spirit. Hopefully we can be just as dysfunctional in Argentina.

Ellie McGinnis has been a part of The Whittier Miscellany staff for four years and currently serves as the publication’s Copy Editor. This is her first year as an independent columnist. In preschool, McGinnis bought all of her teachers cactuses for Christmas.