Celebrate - Live It!

The Twelve Days of Christmas were alive and celebrated in our home until Friday, the a.m. of Epiphany, when as we Christians like to recognize the wise men of the East finally arriving to see the blessed child and his family in their humble stable surroundings - thus ending our Christmas time expectation season of the holy birth. 

At our house, the decorative outdoor lights are now down, the Christmas tree is poking out of its "too small" box in the garage, the creche Penguins (oh yes, it's quite cute that scene of the blessed penguin mother with the baby Jesus peeking from underneath her robe), the more grand and formal creche now miraculously packed in its styrofoam forms and boxes.  I say miraculously as each year when I prepare to return the figures to their places for storage I'm certain there's no way these things will ever conform to the styrofoam formed places from whence they came!  I usually call up my childhood habit of "speaking" to inanimate objects as I promise the creche figures and crystal angels that the year will fly by and that they'll be out of their boxes again very soon.

It was a very nice holiday season for us - though we missed our kids being here, and other assorted in-laws and outlaws unable to travel - still a blessed time for us.  We recalled and recounted the Christmases where and when we've been together and marveled at how fast the time of our lives has flown by.  It's not sadness or regret, but blessings that we recalled.

And now the year 2012 - a date in time we could have only laughed at as children - so far away, a time for really, really old people to be living......surely we would never be old, even if we lived until 2012! 

So with joy and eagerness we/I greet this new year.  Yoga classes are under way, invigorating training runs are happening about two times a week, Renovare get-togethers resume, as do Board committee meetings, a family wedding in Minneaplis soon to be celebrated, warm sandy beaches of Maui on the horizon, an e-workshop with "clarity" as its goal, the Seattle Rock n Roll Half Marathon, another one woman show, an Encaustic week long workshop, the Senior Games in Utah, a trip to Italy and a cruise, and oh, the wonder of all things to come yet unnamed or unimagined........2012 is going to be a great year!!  I plan to Celebrate and to Live It!!

Pretty one, smart one, or the baby?

Pretty one, smart one, or the baby?

My siblings and I grew up with Mother's identifying descriptors for each of us......one was the pretty one, one was the smart one, and one was the baby.  Breaking the mold of our perceived places in the family order has been an interesting process and one each of us has faced in our own way.

Although it's really taken years,  I think by now, I hope anyway, we've ALL found out we were and are the pretty ones, the smart ones and, of course, understand that we were ALL the baby at one point or another in the family.  

All of this is to say that we grew up with those roles and it took some time for each of us to recognize the we were made up of many attributes/characteristics other than Mother would have imagined.  She always said she believed that we could do anything we wanted - well sort of - but it took us a long time to shake that doubt that was always represented by our "personal" descriptors repeated again and again from childhood to adulthood.

So on this almost Happy New Year 2012, I stop to wonder if Mother was still with us in this life if she could pick from a hat and identify which of us is the author, the painter, the woodworker......all artists?  How did that happen?!  I project that Mother would be very proud of her pretty one, her smart one, and her baby!

Pretty one, smart one, or the baby?