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(Excerpt from Tales from the Crib: Adventures of an Over-Sharing, Stressed-Out, Modern-Day Mom by DeeDee Filiatreault.)

I remember one Christmas when my mother had it all together. Just one.

That one fine year, I'd come home from school most December afternoons and find something new under our tree, topped with a cheap stick-on bow. This level of advance preparation was something new and rare in our house, something peaceful and enchanting. I loved that year.

Every other Christmas of my memory involved Mom's traditional Christmas Eve scavenger hunt for the Lost Treasures of Yule followed by a late-night wrapping frenzy of flying Scotch tape and dime-store paper.

My mom's holiday hurriedness would reach its crescendo on Christmas afternoon when she would let out a gasp, dash off to the underbelly of the spare bed, and unearth a tambourine or a latch hook kit she'd tucked away and forgot ever existed. (I wonder if that's where the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine is that I never got…)

As dearly as I'd hoped to usher in my own motherly Christmases all cool, calm and curling-ribboned, history has a way of repeating itself - like the day 30 years later when my kindergartener and I thoughtfully brought cookies to the school bus driver.

I was commiserating at the bus stop with another mom friend, recounting all that was frazzling us this Christmas. She had a ticking time bomb of a sickly husband, ready to stick the stomach bug in everyone's stockings. I had all these wildly insurmountable work deadlines, stacked on top of my towering pile of unwritten Christmas cards. Neither of us had wrapped the first gift - cheapie bows or none. Together we threw aside O Holy Night and sang a rousing chorus of O Holy Crap.

On that day's to-do list, the single solitary item I'd checked off was one little bag of Christmas cookies for the bus driver. (Never mind that I bought them from the school bake sale.)

My daughter, Lucy, wanted to present the cookies herself, which I told myself would be a lovely way for her to act out the spirit of giving…or some baloney like that. Why were my Spidey senses not tingling like mad as I placed this precious cargo into her wee hands?

Oh, you know what happened next.

Lucy heard the bus coming. She ran. She tripped. She fumbled the bag, which fell to Earth in a crumbly crash.

Then my darling daughter - like Godzilla trudging through Tokyo - staggered, stumbled and stomped all over my pretty bag of cookies.

There lay my one yuletide accomplishment in pieces on the ground, the bag busted wide, its sugary entrails sprinkled with grass and sand.

I suddenly morphed into Marlon Brando, hands on my head, crying heavenward in holiday agony, "LLLUUUUUCCCYYYYY!"

Then like some inept schlubby Magi, I toted my humble gift back home in defeat and added these words to my to-do list: "Get bus driver a Dunkin' Donuts gift card."

The death of those cookies felt like the last straw - as if gnarly green fingers had come along and snatched my last can of Who Hash. But once I stopped my glowering, all I could do was double over and laugh.

My Grinchy heart grew three sizes that day. Because ready or not, perfect or not, Christmas was coming...and not from a store. (Or someone else's oven).

Christmas, I mused, must mean a little bit more.

Therefore, in the true spirit of the season, I did what had to be done. I smiled. I reflected on my many blessings. Then I flicked the grass off those cookie shards and ate them for breakfast.

I'm sure it's what the bus driver would have wanted.

- DeeDee Filiatreault

DeeDee Filiatreault is all about finding the funny in family. She has spent the last decade writing witty, warm-hearted essays about the foibles of family life, beginning with a humor column for her local weekly newspaper in Shoreline, Connecticut in 2007 and now for her blog, www.TalesFromTheCribBlog.com. She is thrilled with the publication of her first book of essays, Tales from the Crib: Adventures of an Over-Sharing, Stressed-Out, Modern-Day Mom, which she hopes will bring a sense of solidarity and healthful snorts of laughter to other woefully inadequate parents who read it. She has spent her entire adult life as a writer for all kinds of people and places, including a New England art museum, a Southern mega-church and former South Carolina Governor David Beasley as his chief speechwriter. A transplant from the Carolinas, she now lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, a cat, a fish, a rabbit and an odd little mutt who never stops staring at her.