Monday, December 25, 2006

Merry Christmas

Christmas was different this year from any I've spent -- but there were some very sweet benefits.

It was relaxing. I've focused for so many years on making Christmas nice for everyone else, and even though I'd enjoy it, it was stressful. This year I paid more attention to me.

It was full of food and laughter and good conversations with friends and neighbors. One of the big goals we'd set when we moved here was to get involved, make friends, actually have a social life -- something there just was no time nor energy for in the Bay Area. We feel very blessed to have enjoyed the company of friends both last night and today. It was very special.

I feel very loved -- by my dear husband who wrote a wonderfully mushy, tender letter to me that made me puddle -- and by my daughter who sent me the first quilt she's ever made, stitched together by hand, and then she used the sewing machine to quilt it. There is love in every stitch, and I feel it. She also sent a reminder of past tradition with her own home-canned rhubarb sauce, a little box of wild rice, a deck of cards (we used to play cards for hours with Mother, laughing, nibbling on fudge and cookies and nuts). It made me puddle too, but the tears today were sweet.

Okay, there were a few moments that were flat -- but doesn't everyone have that on holidays? Most of us have a picture of the perfect, loving, Norman Rockwellian Christmas in our heads, but that is simply not reality. There are no perfect families. But family means loving your relatives, warts and all, and accepting them where they are rather than where you wish they were.

Easier said than done, hm. Another one of those things we work on day by day, even on Christmas.

I want the Christmas feeling to continue through this week, though. I'm not ready to resume routine chores, start on long-overdue tasks, or stop eating cookies. Not yet. That's what January is for -- starting over, new beginnings, second chances, diets, resolutions.

I want to do only what I absolutely have to do for the good of the order, but mostly I want to eat the calorie-laden leftovers in my fridge, watch movies, read the book Santa left me, enjoy the lights and decorations for one more week, and simply stop doing and just focus on being this week. That seems like a good way to end this year and start the next.

Merry Christmas. May you feel blessed where you are in this cycle of life.

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