Hooray! It’s “Give Someone a Genuine Compliment Day”!

I am so excited that today is “Give Someone a Genuine Compliment Day“!  Haven’t heard of it?  Maybe that’s because I invented it.  Yeah, that’s right, I made it up… so what of it?  Today still ROCKS! 

This day is in part inspired by my 4-year-old, Thomas, who declared- “We love each other on Valentine’s Day!”   And then I started thinking… how often do we take time to REALLY love each other?

“Give Someone a Genuine Compliment Day” is also a positive alternative for those of you who HATE Valentine’s Day.  I have a few friends, single AND married, who were dreading today.  They HATE it.  I get that.  Single people who don’t want to be single are made to feel extra lonely on Valentine’s Day, and coupled people are under all this pressure to create the the perfect day and feel/be overtly romantic.  A woman is set up to be disappointed, and her man is set up to fail to meet her lofty expectations.  Feh.  Don’t get me wrong, I think romance is good and necessary.  But I also think romance operates better when it happens freely and spontaneously, and not under so much duress and expectation.

Let’s think beyond romantic love today.  I think it is also wonderful, and SO important, just be LOVING!

The most wonderful time of the year!

 

 

Do you all know what the most wonderful time of the year is??  Why, Post-Christmas bargain shopping time, of course! 

I kid… sorta.  Not really.  I am currently fighting off the urge to go out and indulge in another round of frenzied cosumerism.  

I hope all of you had a wonderful, wonderful holiday full of love and laughter.  Our holiday was kinda unusual.  It was a “Christmas Story” sort of Christmas, I will write more about it later.  Short version: it was disrupted by the dreaded INFLUENZA.  Mapman tested positive for it after waiting THREE HOURS at a doc-in-a-box on Christmas Eve.  Junky way to spend that special day.  Not what we had in mind.   Then he spent most of the next 2 days sleeping.  It was lonely sometimes.

By the way, he was the first case of Flu at that office this season, and one of the very first in the state.  Always the leader, my husband.   

I then had to schlep the kids alone to my Mom’s for Christmas Eve.  Then we totally MISSED two family gatherings on Christmas Day.  As disappointed as I was, I still found Christmas and shall keep it in my heart all year through.  I know I have a lot to be thankful for and spent Christmas Day making memories with the three people I love the most (when my husband was awake).  We made very merry, thank you very much.

By the way, I think it may have been good that we didn’t do the holiday family crush as we had planned, which was spending the night at my Mom’s Christmas Eve, & then his Mom’s Christmas Day.  Instead we spread it out and finished family celebrations yesterday because Mapman is finally feeling better (thank you, Tamiflu).  Even with that little bit Percy has been in meltdown mode and really having a hard day today.  I shudder to think how hard things COULD have been on him.  For those of you who don’t know, my son has an Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Too much stimulation and disruption in routine can create explosive results.

Anyway, the day after Christmas I got to go to one of my very favorite events– the Target HALF-OFF HOLIDAY SALE!!!!!  Do any of you recall the debacle of the post-Easter sale?  This time I went SANS kids.  It was glorious.  I know you want to hear about it! 

Let’s Keep Christmas

Henry Van Dyke wrote these words are approximately 100 years ago, yet they still hold just as much truth today.  I clipped it out of my newspaper last year… and kept it up ALL year to remind me.  That’s the whole point.

Keeping Christmas by Henry Van Dyke

Are you willing…

to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you;

to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world;

to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground;

to see that men and women are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy;

to own up to the fact that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life;

to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness.

Are you willing to do these things even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas.

An Easter Story

As Easter approaches I realize I have an overwhelming sense of melancholy.  It happened also at Christmas to a certain extent–I was longing for the Christmases of my childhood, mourning the passing of time and of loved ones, missing those who were far away.  At Easter this is heightened by the fact that I have buried far too many loved ones this time of year.  Not only that, but I have done two death-bed vigils/”goodbyes” on Easter Sunday.  The first time it happened I tried even harder to keep the joyous spirit of the day alive by handing out Easter eggs filled with goodies to all the loving family members who had gathered.  The second time something in me forever changed– it broke, actually,  and I don’t think it has been quite fixed yet.

Thank Easter Bunny, Bawk Bawk!

 

 

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 This is one of the cutest commercials EVER!  Enjoy the trip down memory lane.

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To Bunny or Not To Bunny?

 

That is a question I never thought I would ask.  I always assumed we would do the Easter Bunny thing at my house and he would hop into our lives just as he did when I was a child.  I never questioned it for a second.  After all, Easter held such joy and magic for me, with all the bright Easter eggs and fuzzy baby animals.  Seeing all the decorations still makes me feel like a child excitedly waiting for morning when my basket full of goodies will be waiting for me.  Yet as Easter approaches and I realize that my son knows nothing about the Easter Bunny I am not so sure that is a bad thing.