I Read Too Much

Christmas is a really hard time of year for me.  Oh, it hasn't always been hard, just in the recent past few years.  For those who have followed this blog for any given amount of time, you know it was during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season that the ex-Mr. left.  I won't sit here and tell you there hasn't been some happy Christmas memories since that time, there have, but, there are also many that make this time of year hard.  I want to share straight off that this post will be raw - you don't have to read/finish beyond this point. It is during the Christmas season that I find in my heart so much hurt, pain, and, yes, even anger. I want to tell you I can pinpoint it to one exact thing, and maybe if I look at it hard enough I really can.  Christmas is supposed to be a time of celebration, a time to honor and remember the birth of our Savior. Yet, I have found that I cannot, especially at this time of year, put away all of the feelings I have about how Christma...

This year the days leading up to Christmas have been a bevvy of mixed emotions for me. Yes, last year I was wreck.  You all read it, here, in black and white.  Yet when I read back over some of those posts I wonder where that woman is who had so much faith.  That woman who clung so hard to the hope that just maybe she would receive a Christmas miracle after all.  It didn't come.  I secretly, well, not really, I publicly believed in it.  Don't get me wrong I still believe in miracles.  I still believe that God is in the miracle making business, I just know that that wasn't mine.  Despite all that, despite how I feel and the sadness that overwhelms me most of the time, I cannot actually forgo the season, as much as I may have wanted to.  I have my Littles to think about.  They, these precious gifts of mine, do still believe in miracles and it is my duty to provide them with that.  So, I set out this year to do the best I could ...

I got to thinking about traditions the other day.  What constitutes a tradition?  Is it something that has to have happened for so long that you don't remember when, or even where, it started?  Is it something that you did several years back, a few years back, and then again just recently?  Is it something you decided one day, just a couple of weeks ago, that you are going to start doing?  I ask because it seems that in the scheme of things there are as many traditions as there are people of the world and also just as many that have no traditions at all, and that, in itself, is the tradition. Regardless of how they are born, be it recent or older than Christmas itself, I think there is something almost as magical in a tradition as there is in the season as a whole. When our first daughter was born in 2002 I knew that I wanted to make everything special, especially the holidays.  I'm sure that I am not the only parent in the world ...