Looking back over the holiday season, starting with Halloween, it’s been a different one. For sure. Nothing was the way it usually is in my life up until Christmas Day, which was its typical madhouse of family and fun. Thank goodness for that.
Maybe I’m more aware these days, now that I’m not caught up in all the things I did in my past lives, things like racing four children around to Christmas programs and parties, cooking madly every day, sending out Christmas cards, running a retail store during the holidays, preparing for a Christmas fundraiser (several times at various stages of my life), or wrapping a million presents. I still do cook and shop and wrap presents, although I don’t have to run around town or the whole state looking for a rare Star Wars character or a special purse or all the “had to have” gifts for my kids that we had to physically look for in the olden days. I shop both local and online, so I can find what I want pretty quickly, unless I don’t have a clue what to get. Still a problem.
Thanks to Facebook, I traveled the holidays with friends far and near, watching the preparations of the younger families, sharing memories with my older friends, delighting in masses of photos of how the kids and grandkids are growing. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, this sharing of lives. Thanks for Mark Zuckerberg and whoever invented Instagram for that and don’t let me hear your gripes. It is what it is and you don’t have to be a part of it if it’s not your cup of tea.
Mostly, I’m taken with the people I know who have suffered through the holidays, suffered with loneliness, depression, health issues, grief, anger and bitterness, debilitating illness. There are a lot of people battling demons during the season in which we are supposed to be jolly. There were political issues and divides and scary world threats and all kinds of things that should have made the season not so great. No matter how hard we try, we can’t make the world perfect even for a few days to celebrate the rituals of our faith or the beginning of a new year that we hope will be more perfect.
But, we keep trying. I watched as people I love reached for the joy of the season to stave off the realities of the days that will follow, days of realization that a loved one is gone, days of facing new situations in life due to job loss or illness or more days of loneliness ahead. Some are beaten too far down to lift up for the holidays at all. They suffer through, waiting for it to all be over. Our hearts are touched, even in our own days of celebration.
So, we’re mostly past the season of being jolly, just waiting for the end of this year, waiting for the new year that will bring us…well, we really don’t know what it will bring us, do we? So the message is to celebrate each day we are here, celebrate the good things in our lives, reach out to those who need us to be there for them. There are no guarantees in this life and we really have no idea what lies ahead, no matter how much in control we think we are. The best we can do is to love – love life, love nature, love others, love ourselves. The love of this season and every season and every day is the message.
I hope your 2014 was good and that your 2015 is the best!
Confetti Thoughts 