I saw an ad while watching the Peanuts Christmas Special on TV with the kids. It was for an air freshener that smelled like gingerbread.

It was a simple enough ad, but the overall message of the ad suggested that you could just use the air freshener to fool people into thinking you’d been baking.

And know I ask you the question I’ve been mulling over all evening. Why do we care? Throughout every season of every year, there seem to be particular rules about how we’re supposed to be living. It’s especially noticeable at Christmas. It might stem from the Martha Stewart decade, where perfection was packaged into a strict set of social rules and decorative pillows. But aren’t we all supposed to be more enlightened than that? Haven’t we all moved on?

Our neighborhood, like many others, has an unspoken race in early December, to hand out the largest amount, the best, the most unique gifts to everyone in the neighborhood. Starting just after Thanksgiving, wonderful pastries and other sweets are showing up on my door almost daily. I love it. I really love it. But it also makes me full of an insane amount of pressure every year to top whatever I did last year, to give to an ever-widening circle of neighbors, and to have it done before the Turkey is cold.

I love the idea of doing it, but the social construct that requires me to do it is difficult to overcome.

Rules like this run wild at Christmas-time. All of them seem intently focused on portraying a lifestyle that is largely imaginary. Does anyone really live like Martha Stewart (besides the woman herself? And even then I’m not convinced)? Yet we (I?) often fall into the idea that everyone lives like that, so if I’m not baking, rolling out Philo dough, making my own wrapping paper, scrapbooking, and raising wild chickens, I’m somehow left behind.

In my life it goes something like this: thriving, happy, loving families have successful holiday seasons if they host parties, bake a lot of things, watch the Peanuts Christmas special, go caroling, have elaborately wrapped presents, give gifts to our 100 closest neighbors, have a beautiful, handmade Christmas dress for all their daughters to wear to church, and send out 400 Christmas cards.

I’m trying to ignore the pressure. I love sending the cards, and I love the parties, but the rest of it could get kicked to the curb. Yet I still do it all. I’m just trying to fake it until I somehow grow to love it all, because that’s what I’m supposed to do, right? What a fraud.

I’m sure the rules and norms of your neighborhood or life are different than mine. I’m sure from area to area, the idea of “successful living” differs. But at some point, don’t many of us feel a little pressure to make the house smell like fresh baked gingerbread?