Twenty Decembers ago, I was a single woman living in a rental house with mismatched college furniture and not much in the way of Christmas accoutrement.

What I did have - a dozen votives in glass holders for the coffee table, a string of white twinkle lights for the window and a plain grapevine wreath with a red bow for the door - must have presented well.

"When I saw her house that Christmas, so natural and warm, that’s when I fell in love with her," my husband likes to tell our friends.

Christmas then was a spontaneous expression. Simple. Stark. Natural. Whatever was cheap at the discount store.

Then came marriage and motherhood.

And suddenly, it was no longer enough to hang a naked grapevine wreath on the door.

I had to make my own. Had to.

I couldn’t just send Christmas cards.

I had to hand-paint 117 of them.

I couldn’t give teachers dollar-store coffee cups full of chocolate kisses.

I had to stand in the kitchen for days and nights - sometimes with a baby strapped to my back - stirring enough buttermilk, sugar and pecans to make 130 pralines; wrapping 200 pieces of fudge; sprinkling sugar on 75 lemon bars so as to present teachers, preachers, secretaries, neighbors and the mailman with the perfect combination of chocolatey, nutty and tart.

With each passing year, I upped the ante, so that by the time a few years ago that my kids were 15, 11 and 6, I was making ornaments for our pets, throwing sugar-cookie parties for 17 kids in three different schools and packing up a dozen packages for out-of-towners even as I was attending viola and choir and piano concerts throughout December. I would make spiced eggnog from scratch and miniature wreaths for my husband’s co-workers and Styrofoam snowmen and popcorn garlands for the tree. I would generally make and bake and create myself into the ground until one Dec. 18 a couple of years ago, I wound up at the hospital with heart palpitations.

"You’re not suffering from heart disease," the nurse practitioner told me after she ran a battery of stress tests, echo tests and Ultrasounds. "You’re suffering from Christmas disease."

I see women like me, purposeful grimaces on their faces in the stores this time of year, and I wonder: Are they happy inside those Christmas sweatshirts? Or are they caught up in some commercially and socially and emotionally concocted web, dare I say, addicted, to copying every possible craft Ladies’ Home Journal says they can?

And why?

What was I looking for all those years, anyway? Was it tradition or perfection I was trying to solidify? Did I want Christmas to be the quintessential memory in my children’s childhoods? Or did I just want somebody to tell me I was the best?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. All I know is that I’m done.

I know I’m done because it’s the second week of December, I’ve completed about 4 percent of my shopping, And my pulse is still a slow and steady 64.

I know I’m done because all we have on the Christmas tree right now are four strands of lights, blue alternating with white. They are colors of calm and purity - which is what I feel this year. I walk into the living room, and I feel peace instead of stressed: The living room embodies gentle enchantment instead of a showroom at Mr. Santa’s Emporium.

My family feels it, too. When I told my kids and my husband I was going to pull back on all the trappings of Christmas, they surprised me with their answer. "Good!" they all said. As if they knew all along better than I.

I know I’m done because this year when we went to the Christmas tree farm to get our tree, I asked the man to hand me one of the $10 evergreen wreaths hanging on the post near the barn where he keeps the axes.

I took the wreath home and hung it on the door without so much as even a bow. Simple. Stark. Natural.

Peace.

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