My holiday plans aren’t really coming along yet, but they will be soon. We’ve been really busy at the store – lots of hustle and bustle during Christmastime! The place is so decked out with trees, lights, snowmen, Santas, holly, and hot cider, it feels like our home is already decorated, even though it’s just the store. There’s also been a lot going on with me personally/emotionally lately, so I’ve spent a lot of time at home after work just doing really monotonous but extremelytherapeutic things such as cutting words and images out of magazines to build up a stash. This means I’m probably not going to get as much done for Christmas as I wanted, or at least at the time I wanted to, but I don’t think I really mind right now.
Last night I spent an hour sitting on my couch listening to Christmas music turning those calendar pages into envelopes. I’ve been dealing with some heavy sadness for the last couple of weeks, and I have to say that particular art therapy was one of the most relaxing things I’ve done in a long time. Many of the calendars were pictures of Seattle, which I thought would makegreat RAK or Swap-return envelopes, since I live in Seattle.
We don’t have our tree quite yet, but we’re hoping to get one this weekend. We found a farm we really liked (I grew up on a tree farm, so I’m picky) last year, so we’re going back. We got what I think was a blue spruce variety (or maybe a noble?), and that darn tree was still perfectly greenand supple in February. I didn’t have the heart to throw it out when it still seemed so much alive, so we finally resorted to starving it to death and quit watering it, but even then it still took several more weeks to die. Ha! So we’re going back there again.
As far as traditions we do for Christmas, that remains to be seen. It has been hard for me to get into Christmas since I was married, because I always associated the season with things related to being in my childhood home with my family, so when I didn’t have that it didn’t feel like Christmas. So, for the last couple years we’ve been working on the transition of building our own traditions and associations, and this is the first year since we got married that I’ve really started feeling that warm fuzzy Christmas feeling. Thank God (literally)! I missed that feeling….
I did write a list of the things I’d like to do this month leading up to Christmas – some may seem silly, but here are some of them: go to a Christmas play, walk around Wights and gaze at all the eye candy (this nursery in Lynnwood, WA with a huge gift shop that is totally Christmasland), read Little Women (an annual favorite), make Christmas ATCs to hang as ornaments in our tree, make homemade hot chocolate with peppermint whipping cream, make English toffee, send out a Christmas letter (we haven’t done this yet!), attend all the candlelight advent services at church, clean my apartment so I don’t’ spend my entire vacation cleaning and organizing, and taste my first roasted chestnut.