In the spirit of the season ...

While I am Pagan, and hubby is spiritual, we wish the best of blessings on everyone this time of year. Our Yule celebration, such as it was, was last week on the solstice. Today, we had fun just laying about in bed most of the day, and haven't even bothered with the tv and all our DVR'd stuff yet. Hubby is sleeping, I have been knitting on a scrap afghan to use up some of these gazillion tiny balls of scrap yarn I have boxed up and laying around here, playing games on Facebook and getting myself Christmas presents in the form of more free books for my Kindle for PC.

No decorations, no tree, no nothing this year as no place to put the tree with having to hunker down in the living room anyhow. How's that working out? Mostly ok, the house generally is staying 15-20 degrees warmer than the outdoors, which isn't saying much right now considering that a major winter storm is trying to come through and it's only in the 20's outside. So you can imagine that with the winds blowing in the low teens when they do, and the low temps to start, that it's not all that warm in the house. The cat's don't mind too much, they're busily racing around and having a blast play-fighting off and on all day.

Me, my toes are a bit chilled right now because I'm sitting in the one chair we kept out here while writing, because I'm fixing dinner for us - turkey teriyaki - and the thermostat on the space furnace only reads 42, wavering a bit to 43, because it's actually got to warm up here on the mountain to get the snow that's predicted. It's just too darned cold out for it to snow right now, which is fine with me. Cold I can tolerate, snow is part of why I moved to the Ozarks and away from Michigan - I grew up with the stuff for six months a year, I don't really like it! Dinner could have been chicken, but doggone it, I'm too cheap to buy chicken to put in it when we have a freezer full of turkey to use. I got out one of the big breast packages to thaw the other day and it's so huge that half of it got sliced up, wrapped back up and stuck back in the fridge for warm sammiches later tonight.

We're doing a lot of soups and warm sammiches and pasta bowls and such - comfort foods that are warm and make us feel good and full and at least somewhat happy. I do feel some like crying, because it's Christmas and once again, I had to put my Yuletide traditions aside in favor of no space for them, and not having everything for them. Next year, now that we're in a house and all, I will do them.

My traditions, you ask? They're not too complicated, but they mean a lot to me and my family. Mom and I started them when I was little and she was a single parent - she raised me herself as best she could, so traditions were important to us and kept me (with my mental issues I was developing even then) fairly stable. I knew that certain days of the week meant certain activities, and that helped me, with my developing PTSD and BPD and bipolar II, to keep stable and calm and able to deal with the world. I'm so lucky with Quentin that he puts up with my mental issues, and has learned to work around them!

But traditions, especially for the Christmas season, were so important to me. Never mind that with my issues, I didn't really feel the excitement and expectation of everybody else (and still don't). For me, it's the traditions that are the important thing, not whether I personally feel anything. I'm blessed enough that I experience the emotions and get to have some joy in everyone else's excitement about things.

So Thanksgiving to Twelfth Night became important to me while young. Thanksgiving itself not so much for the food and family and all, but because once we had dinner eaten and cleared away, and the dishes all done and dried and put up, it was TIME. Time for me to climb up into our attic and get all the boxes of Christmas stuff, and hand them down to Mom, who could climb that ladder if need be, but not overly well, with her bum knee. Time to come back down and start opening boxes and putting the tree together and hanging up decorations and putting the ornaments on the tree and then enjoying the lights and the happiness that I could feel over the fun we'd had that day.

And then when my kids came along, and as each got old enough to "help," the tradition got added to, along with the fact that by then, Mom had joined the library book club, and one of the gals there was a teacher at the local Catholic school. Cheryl (which is also my Mom's name) liked to buy Christmas stories every year and read them to her students during the Advent season. And she'd bring some of them to the Christmas party for the book club and read them to the ladies as they had tea or coffee and cookies that everyone brought to share, and opened their presents to each other. A few of those stories made their way into our tradition.

All but one are a modern tale. We began to start, on my daughter's insistence on including it, with the Nativity story from the Bible. I may not agree with a great deal of The Good Book, but that story always gives me a big uplift to my spirits. A couple of others are The Christmas Candle, by Richard Paul Evans; The Christmas Box, also by Richard Paul Evans; and my favorite, The Christmas Miracle of Johnathon Toomey, by Susan Wojciechowski.

We'd end by taking everything down on Twelfth Night, especially after my daughter was born, as her birthday isn't much after that. It also became a tradtion for Mom to send me all those goofy Hallmark singing tabletop doodads when they started coming out with them, because she gets them cheap with buying all her special holiday cards at Hallmark.

So what are YOUR holiday traditions? Think on what makes you happy during the holidays, what you do to make the season bright and special to you, and don't forget to do them if at all possible.