Day #87, #88, #89, & #90: It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

I love, love, love this time of the year!!! I'm the crazy person listening to Christmas carols while preparing Thanksgiving dinner, spending insane amounts of money on holiday decor, and enjoy the cold nights and shorter days. I love the holidays! Nothing lifts me up more than a twinkling Christmas, a toasty pair of wool socks and wrapping Christmas presents while watching A Christmas Story for the umpteenth hundred time.

Calvin Coolidge wrote Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas." The holidays are my own personal form of Prozac. I seem to have a spring in my step and a twinkle in my eye. I am in no better mood than this time of the year. If it was possible to buy a time-share or rent a bungalow at the north pole I would so be there.

I think it has something to do with the spirit of the season. It is generally this time of the year that I feel most in tune with my spiritual side and more enamored by ritual and tradition. Despite one who generally balks and tradition and ritual...I'm convinced I may possible spontaneously combust if I saunter into mass one Sunday morning...the ritual of the holidays provides me tremendous comfort. I feel like I get to visit with the one's I love the most, that bygones will be bygones and all can be forgotten, and that the capacity for love and kindness is infinite.

I treasure baking kruschiki with my mother, father, brother, and sister and have incredibly fond memories of being covered from head to toe with powdered sugar and watching my brother devour half of the batch before we're even finished. I love the smell of fresh pine and pink-cold noses. I will never forget by brother waking us at 4 in the morning to see if Santa had come or my sister informing my father that Santa stole the milk glass one year, only to return the wrong glass the following year. I now understand why my parents made a bee-line for the coffee machine on those early Christmas mornings. It was just about being together, pajamas clad, sleepy eyed, but so full of wonder and hope for the coming year to come.

And, unlike most people, I find this time of the year to be the most romantic of ever. When I do manage to get married, believe me, it will be a snow-filled, ice-cycle sparkling bonanza! It could even snow for all I care...snow is white anyway!

It was once written "Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man." So live it up this year! Enjoy this beautiful winter season whether you celebrate Christmas or not. Regardless, it is a spectacular time of the year. As Terri Guillements wrote,
"The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination."