Peace in The Season

 

With the holidays barrelling down at us, we are starting to feel the stress of what all the seasons curtail. 

We are frantically trying to find gifts for loved ones with a supply chain that is lacking all the things we feel we need, but do we? Maybe this is a gift we have been given. Perhaps this season we can focus on family, food, and spending time together. It is the season for sharing good times with family. Perhaps this is the year you buy books for all your family from a local book store. Maybe it's where you all cook together and share a special meal with the entire family at the table. 

Think outside the box and come up with family scavenger hunts, hiking trails and see who can identify the most trees, who can find deer prints in the trail. I know I am guilty of wanting to buy buy buy at this time of year, but this year, after almost two years of this chaos known as covid, I've gotten smaller and smaller when it comes to presents. I want this year to give gifts that are truly wanted, cherished, and loved.

I am thinking of a small real tree, Christmas music in the background all season. Singing silent night like I did as a child. I want to give books this year. Ones that support a small independent bookstore, but also that my adult children will cherish. I want to have them come for the holidays and make this year's holiday gingerbread house together. We will have great food and we will celebrate this joyous time of year. I may even make gingerbread cookies for them to decorate. Did I mention my kids are full-blown adults?  They are but they still love to do the decorating, the cookie making, the lasagne for X mas eve. 

Christmas got to a point where it was so big and noisy and crazy that I feel none of us truly enjoyed it. It got bigger than big and all the presents piled up and none were cherished. None were loved, saying thanks was just something you said, but truly did not mean. This year we will think smaller. More intentional in my shopping.  More mom-and-pop shops and fewer commercial stores.

Tomorrow we decorate the church. Next weekend is the first Sunday in advent. It always comes so fast right after thanksgiving. This season I am saying yes to helping out more at church. I am focusing on what matters and what can be left behind. I want this season to be special, not because of covid, but because we as a family choose to make it magical together.

My children are my world. I have my first grandchild making an entrance for the holidays. I am getting married after Christmas. This season, with just those two things, are already so full. I pray to spend time with my amazing son as the cherry on the top. My two kids hold my heart and I pray this season we find peace in this season and may it be filled with fun, love, laughter, and all that we can cram into it, but may it not be filled with material things that we stack in a pile and let sit for another year in a corner. 

May your holidays be filled to the brim with love, may you shop local and small, may your love for your family flow over so that they know how much they mean to you. May this holiday season be about family, friends, and being together. 

Happy Holiday Season, I am off to practice Silent Night. :)

May you be truly blessed this holiday season,

Your storyteller/ friend/ and poet.

Debbie