The week has ended. Today is truly a TGIF day. I love Saturday because it's an everybody's-home day and it feels like we start with a blank slate. For me Saturday is both the end of the week (because you feel like you get to enjoy yourself after finishing a hard week) and the beginning of it (because the hard week is in the past and it's all green grass and high tides forever in front of you).
Next week is not a normal week. It's Thanksgiving week. The week of giving thanks for all our many blessings. It's also a time when we make too much food that we couldn't possibly eat in a week of Sundays, some of us shop till we drop, and others of us begin the Christmas decorating. It is the beginning of the most stressful season of the year. It's a season full of excess--in fact it epitomizes excess: Excess in eating, drinking, spending, decorating, and celebrating. This year I dread it. I don't feel physically well enough for the ordained whirlwind--especially with all the restrictions I am discovering I have with eating and drinking. And yet I also don't want to give up the traditions I have held onto from my family--many of which involve excess. It's a conundrum.
Tomorrow the family needs to sit down and put together a plan for what we're going to do... no, that's wrong. The family is not the problem--I am. So here's my plan. Here's what I'm going to do. We have been invited by friends for Thanksgiving. Dave will cook a little, but we'll keep it low-key, and our fridge (and ourselves) will not be overstuffed at the end of the day. We'll get our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving, and trim it and decorate the house on Saturday. What we get done Saturday is what all we'll do and the boxes will be put away until it's time to take it all down. There will not be what seems to be unending decorating for Christmas. I will pick a thoughtful gift or two for those I love over the next couple of weeks, and then I will stop. I won't keep frenziedly buying right up through Christmas Eve. None of us need more STUFF. I'm not going to try to make everyone something from my hands.
I don't have to make this stressful for me or anyone else. Let's see if I can stick to that resolution.
P.S.--The workout wth the trainer went GREAT today! I'll see her again next Friday. After getting the Christmas tree.
3 comments:
Wonderful! I think the world of your resolution...
I gave all that up about 20 years ago or longer. I don't do christmas mostly because I'm not a believer in christian theology but also shun the secular/pagan celebration. no decorating here, no getting into debt, no making masses of cookies, the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's are endured, always glad for it to be over.
Having once read 'Skipping Christmas' with its beguiling idea that one could try to ignore that most cruel of holiday seasons - the season with the promise of plenty for all - but mostly and only for those who already have more than they need - ignore at your peril; cultural and familial expectations of more and better (try owning a retail store of any kind and ignore the holiday...). All the fairy tales about it - see the endings of both Skipping Christmas and 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' = they celebrate anyway - without the trappings, then manage to regain the trappings, the roast beast the Who-honklers and the rest, because that is the REAL meaning of Christmas (it doesn't come from a store, but then it does, because we are good and un-greedy Whos? Really Ted?) How many impoverished people actually get those miracles? How hard do some people work to make those miracles for others and then go home to their own overloaded tables and trees, to assuage their guilt at having plenty? signed, the grinch
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