A Slow Holiday Season

Counter with turkey and dishes and snacks

It is Christmastime at our house. We have pulled our trees and ornaments out of storage just in time for the darkest days of the year. It is an unusually wet season (even by Pacific Northwest standards) and most days it seems the sky is under a large piece of dark gray flannel. The sparkling fairy lights strewn over the mantel and the lights of the tree illuminate the house in a way that lamps cannot.

The light fades just as I leave to pick-up my daughter from school. Before I go, I walk through the house, lighting the trees and all the fairy lights. It is a small, festive way to welcome her home from a wet day out in the world.

When we get home, I make a simple snack. Apples and peanut butter, cheese and crackers, or, for a special treat, hot cocoa and popcorn. We sometimes turn on the gas fireplace.

We settle under quilts my mother-in-law made and watch Dash and Lily on Netflix. It is our second year watching it. We greedily look at the dreamy holiday interiors.The holiday soundtrack is perfect. It is less about the story (though it is cute) and more about the sets and costumes. I once dreamed of taking my daughter to see NYC during the holidays. The thought of traveling during these pandemic days makes me wonder if that will ever happen. For now, we revel in the magic of New York city at Christmastime via this show.

This after school time is a liminal space in which rest. A pause between the end of a work and school day, before homework, chores, and cooking begin.

We are taking this holiday slowly. We are not out of a pandemic and we seem more resolved to gracefully bear a quieter Christmas. There will be no travel to see family and parties will be whittled down to a few gatherings with people in our safe bubble. I'm not sure if this new, slower, pace is due to acceptance or exhaustion. Nonetheless, I am embracing it.

I am hibernating, I think, more than savoring. The past few years have exhausted me with worry. It is not a depression. Simply the realization that it is the perfect time to pull inward. Take more naps, eat more soup, celebrate the season in small, meaningful ways. I find we are all curating the most important traditions and leaving the rest of the hustle and bustle of the holidays out.

I wonder. Will we ever go back to the way it was "before"? Will these lessons to slow down stay with us or will we forget the lessons this pandemic has brought us? But those are thoughts for another day. For now, I am enjoying this slower pace.

Wishing you great tidings of comfort & joy. Let me know how you are doing during this holiday season.

Comments

AnonymousDecember 12, 2021 at 8:36 AM
Lovely and magical. So glad you're taking things slowly and making space for the rest you need.
ReplyDelete
Replies
Dana BarbieriDecember 17, 2021 at 4:50 PM
Merry Christmas to you and your family. It sounds like a very lovely season in your home.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Tuesdays are for Writing

I was thinking about how much I enjoy reading about other people’s days. Do you? I hope so, because I’m going to share some of my days with you over the next few weeks. We’ll start with Tuesdays since they are my favorite day of the week. I set Tuesdays aside to write most of the day. No loads of laundry. No errands. Morning The day starts like all my days lately. I wake up at 7:00am. My husband brings me a coffee in bed while a journal for 30 minutes. I recently started setting a timer for my morning journaling because I could spend hours going round and round on the page, ruminating. By setting a timer, I get what I need to release out, but don’t circle down the drain. After that, I get up and immediately go and exercise for 20 minutes. Right now, I’m loving Pahla B’s workouts. They are quick and meant to be for 50+ women. After the workout, I do a 10-minute mediation and am ready to start to my day. I dress and shower and then head to breakfast. Breakfast is the only meal I...

The Sugar Thief

I should have known Stacy was going to be trouble the day I watched in horror as she sprinkled sugar onto her bowl of macaroni and cheese. Anyone with that much of a sweet tooth should not have been allowed within fifty feet of one’s sugar collection. I've moved to Substack. To finish reading this personal essay, click here .

How to Stay Friends without Social Media

How do you stay in touch with people once you leave social media? This one of the main concerns I hear from people when they find out that I’ve quit social media. To be truthful, you will fall out of touch with some people. But you know, that’s not always a bad thing. At least it wasn’t for me. According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the number of people humans can sustain relationships with is 150. He based this number (called Dunbar’s Number ) on the size of the human brain. The thesis is that primates are wired to be in group sizes that will assist with survival. While there are arguments about the validity of this theory, I know I feel stressed-out when I have too many relationships going on and not enough time to nurture them. Being a good wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend is very important to me. It brings me joy to take care of the people I love. I cook for them, check-in on them regularly, and give them my focused attention when I am with them. But I mus...

What Lies Beneath

Since I last wrote about my garden , a lot has happened. And a lot hasn’t happened. We went from a wet spring to a few sparse weeks of beautiful summer weather, and then roared into blistering heat. My garden, unable to contend with Mother Nature’s mood swings, had suffered. Between heat waves, I would wander into my garden and, instead of looking to see what was growing, I looked for destruction. Which crop failed this week? The beds, usually lush and beautiful, have big bare spots where the vegetables failed to grow. Our potato plants, which seemed to be the only crop that survived the wet spring, had dried and brown foliage, leaving me to wonder if my Irish blood somehow invited blight. While the garden withered so did we. Heat, illness, and general malaise made us wither almost as much as our garden. In the midst of this ennui, my husband and I trudged out to face our wilting, seemingly dead garden, ready to pull the dead plants, and to grieve over the failed plot. ...

Leaving Social Media

I took my first social media detox in November 2018. I decided to take a break for 30 days. It felt amazing and I learned a lot about myself and my use of social media. I returned to social media, as planned, determined to take the lessons I learned from the detox to mindfully interact with Facebook and Instagram. I had the very best intentions. By May 2019, all my good intentions were forgotten and I found I was back to a place where social media was affecting me negatively . I promised myself that I would get back on track. (You know where this is going, right?) Before long, I was back to what I perceived as an unhealthy relationship with Instagram and Facebook. Something needed to change. The pandemic hit. I used it as an excuse to stay 'connected'. Instead of feeling connected, I watched in horror as people tore each other apart online, saying things they would never to say to one another if they were face to face. In September 2020, I deleted my business page and told my...

Sketchbook Musings

I sometimes wonder what my grandchildren will think if they flip through my sketchbooks? When they pick-up my Botanical Wonder Sketchbook will they see that I was an avid gardener, deeply in love with nature? Will they marvel at my account of almanac-like posts and see a personal account of climate change? When they flip through my Recipe Sketchbooks, they will see the Ambrosia recipe I wrote down and illustrated, based on my great-grandmother's recipe. Will they be inspired by notes on our family tradition Taco Nights? Or maybe they will already have Taco Nights and realize where the tradition started. When they look at my Artist Sketchbooks, they will see that I designed a line of rubber stamps, based on my love of tea and gardens, and notes for some of my embroidery designs. Will they be inspired to learn how to embroider or explore their own creativity? When they look at...

The Aging Inner Critic

A funny thing happened over the past decade. My inner critic got old. The last time I really looked at my inner critic, about fifteen years ago, she looked like the identical twin of my high school art teacher. The one who told me that I didn’t have any artistic talent, thus crushing my dreams of becoming a fashion designer. But I looked my inner critic up the other day and discovered that witch got old! She no longer appears as my high school art teacher but is a completely new character running around in my head messing with me. She tells me her name is Maude and she’s an old woman of the most crotchety type. Her skin is creped and full of wrinkles, her hair is gray, she is short (like me) and thin (not like me, which, She points out, is because I over-indulge and She doesn’t). She smells of camphor liniment and the peppermint candies she clicks against her teeth whenever someone (me) says or does something that She doesn’t think is “appropriate”. Tsk. She wears sag...

This is a Dress

This is a dress that was bought in a 1980s, Gunne Sax outlet that was tucked into a rundown strip mall in downtown Montclair, California. A store where the dressing room was one, big open room and my 15-year-old self thought she might die of embarrassment undressing in front of other women. This is a dress that was worn to one or two of the six formals I went to in high school. On the arm of boys named Tom and Jeff. Boys I dreamed of making a life with one day. Boys I am so glad I didn’t marry. Boys that were kind and handsome and sometimes thoughtless and hurtful. Boys that put up with the same from me. This is a dress that danced to the music of The Cure and Depeche Mode . In gyms that reeked of sweat, hormones, Obsession perfume, and Polo cologne. A dress that rustled when I walked and felt smooth under the tentative hands of teenage boys as they held me during slow dances. A dress that made my girlfriends squeal in delight, as I did the same for them and their dresses. ...

Using Photos as Writing Prompts

I was going to throw this photo away. I've been on a mission to cull my personal photo collection and this one was a candidate for the trash bin. One of the criteria for keeping a photograph is whether it will have any meaning to future generations and the cropped head of my mother in this photo would make it impossible for anyone else to identify the subject. But as I looked at the photo, mulling over it's fate, I began to notice that it contained multitudes of information about my childhood and sparked memories that I would one day want to write about. The trick was to sit with the photo long enough and focus not only on the person in the photo, but also the location. Once I began this process, I found I couldn't wait to get to my writing prompt notebook and start writing. Of course, this my childhood photo and, as a writer who is focusing on the memoir genre, it is loaded with topics for future essays but even a fiction writer could find inspiration through this process ...

Curiosity and Experimentation in a Writing Practice

Experimentation is a big part of my life. When I work on my visual art, I always strive to find new techniques to improve my work and make it more interesting. When I cook, I try new recipes, tweak old ones, and use new ingredients. The list of experiments goes on and on. Now I try to bring that same air of curiosity to my writing practice. My Writing History When I first started writing, many years ago (before computers! gasp!) I wrote my first drafts in longhand, in journals then they would get typed up. Eventually, I moved to a word processor, which allowed for some editing on screens but I usually stuck to handwriting to start. Computers came along and it took me awhile to write directly into a Word document. I think I finally crossed over into writing my drafts electronically around the time my blogging began in earnest. But now, as I’ve begun my journey to take my writing more seriously, and am working on writing an actual book, I’ve found that I have gone back to h...

laura k bray

Search This Blog