“Have you thought about your centerpiece?”

I stifled a laugh. My mom was scrolling through Pinterest on her iPad, intently focused on thumbnail images of elaborate holiday table settings.

“I mean, I have a candle,” I replied.

“That’s nice,” she murmured, completely oblivious to the amusement on my face. “I’m thinking of making a poinsettia wreath to go around the hurricane candle, with personalized two-tone reindeer ornaments at each place setting that the guests can take home as favors.”

Sounds great, Mom. Have at it.  

For as long as I can remember, my mother has had a gift for hospitality and a love for all things decorative.

She simply loves to serve others, and for her, that means weeks of planning and executing elaborate meals in order to properly entertain company. Based on our most recent conversation, this year would be no different: beginning in October, she would begin planning, organizing, shopping, and cooking for the perfect Christmas dinner.

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The family tradition of formal dinners with fine china and elegant place settings goes back multiple generations. I can’t recall a holiday meal at my grandmother’s house that didn’t utilize the most sophisticated things she could afford. For my mother and grandmother, it was a bonding experience—they both had a gift for serving, and they did it well together. They were gifted in a way that I, seemingly, was not.

You see, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy those dinners.

While being together for family holidays was wonderful, I grew to dread the chronic anxiety that surrounded the meal. I saw the women in my family go through an annual Christmas version of the proverbial astronaut letdown; there was so much build-up to the actual gathering that they couldn’t seem to relax and enjoy themselves. As a consequence, I slowly came to believe that the familial expectations surrounding holiday dinners—from the intricate centerpieces to the succulent casseroles–reflected a standard of perfection that I simply could not meet.

And with that perceived standard of perfection came a good deal of resentment and feeling excluded.

For most of my adult life, I simply believed I didn’t inherit the hospitality gene. Every year I had watched my mom’s anxiety climb as the holidays got closer and closer, and I found myself turned off, not wanting to participate in the annual preparations. Yes, my husband and I would attend Thanksgiving and Christmas, but you were more likely to find me in the living room working on a jigsaw puzzle waiting on dinner rather than helping my mom and sister in the kitchen.

The formality of everything made me uncomfortable to the point I avoided the table as much as possible, focused more on how I could survive the day without absorbing my mom’s anxiety.

Yet avoidance is never a great tactic in the long run. I only began to feel more and more excluded from the women in my family, convinced I was inferior in some way because I didn’t know the difference between Royal Albert’s Lavender Rose and Old Country Roses.  

Fortunately, a friend recently challenged me in my conception of hospitality. “You say you don’t have the gift of hospitality,” she said, “but you’re kind and you do what you can to help others in need. Why does hospitality have to equate to putting the soup spoon to the right of the knife?”

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So this holiday season, I’ll be practicing hospitality.

While my mother’s manifestation of her gift looks different than mine, we both share the desire to love and serve others.

She loves beautiful place settings; I love a “come as you are” atmosphere for a meal.

She loves to cook for guests; I love to get a catered meal so I can have more time for heart-to-heart conversations with friends.

Neither is better than the other—we have similar hearts, we just serve differently. After all, I am my mother’s daughter.

But just for the record, we’ll be using paper plates when it’s my turn to host Christmas.