My lectures aren’t very popular, especially with my son. He rolls his eyes at me. I am soooo uncool. And I don’t get it: the pain in his life. We are on opposite sides of the world just now. He wants to shut the door on me every chance he gets. I understand. This is what he’s supposed to do. He’s becoming a man. It just sucks, because I’ll never be able to articulate to anyone how much I love that kid.

When someone hurts him I just want to go crazy. I have a lot to say. I want to go on a tirade and explain the psychology of people around him. I don’t want him to take things personally so I go to epic proportions of explanation of convoluted psychology about relationships….which bores the snot out of him. 

I can’t do it. 

It’s better if I find a way to connect. 

I remind him of when he was really little. Frances had a lousy best friend. Do you know Frances? A Bargain for Frances was a hot-ticket item when we visited the library each week for story hour during the toddler years.

Frances had a friend, Thelma, who tricked her. Frances was saving her money for a real china tea set all in blue. Thelma convinced her that a plastic tea set was preferable and sold hers to Frances, then promptly spent the money on a real china tea set all in blue. Thelma is the same friend who helped Frances to get doused in the freezing pond when they went skating and other adventures that didn’t turn out so well. When Frances discovers she’s been duped yet again she uses some trickery of her own. Backsies or no backsies.

It’s a story about manipulation and trust. I have an eager and trusting son. Just like Frances, he never remembers when a friend hurts him. I use the story of Frances a lot. It is my cautionary tale; a shorthand when I’ve said “Be careful,” one too many times.

Other story book characters are alive and well in our family lore. I adore the one I read below about Mr. Putter. It illustrates that there are dozens of ways to get what we want if we’re willing to simply surrender to the fun of life and forget about being cranky. Plus it involves tearing up a lousy present from a relative. Who doesn’t want to do that?

Do you use story to change the narrative in your children’s lives? Who are your favorite characters?  Have you ever cut up underwear to make a slingshot?

Can stories distract us? Here’s Alix Spiegel’s investigation about serotonin and how people want to simplify the complications of depression by treating biology. 

I want to hear your stories and the altared spaces they’ve created in your life.

What’s the best thing you’ve done as a parent? How can you give that to the child inside yourself?

As a parent one of the things I’ve done really well is decorate our family tree and create seasons of celebration that are simple and unique to our family. Every Valentine’s Day I tell my family I love them with little missives on hearts, or in a letter with a heart to match.

I hide them around the house on Valentine’s Day…a sort of treasure hunt for my love.

The process evolved

• Paper hearts became felt hearts
• Felt hearts became fabric hearts
• A single fabric heart each year accompanies a written letter

This year I’m trying something new. The story of my great love has worked well to develop children with strong identities. Can I give the same gift to myself?

• By making hearts
• And listing things I see that created intimacy for me?

 What altared spaces do you celebrate that treasure the love you have for yourself? How has becoming a good parent taught you to nurture yourself? What packages do you use to wrap up the story of your love and deliver it to someone special?

I spent January thinking about cleaning up and letting go. Now I’m leading a class called Altar Your Life: A Soulful Cleanse. Wanna join us?

 I love this story about unconditional love from the program This American Life. One of my favorite quotes is drawn from this transcript. “Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business.”

I traced the metal rivets in the leather chair in which I sat. They were as evenly spaced as the hanging bags and monitors that were keeping my step-father comfortable as he journeyed toward death. The cold of the linoleum floor in the ICU crept through my socks each time I stood to apply chapstick or offer a sip from the straw. But I didn’t want shoes. As I sat down I wanted to cocoon my feet up under me, playing the waiting game.

A single strand of halogen light pierced the room where right and left curtain didn’t overlap and told me night had fallen outside. I could see his features clearly. “Shit,” he’d spit, talking to someone far away. “God Damn It!” came the answer. I was a witness to his war within.

He had a heart condition when my mother met him decades ago. She was concerned about getting involved with a man who was dying. Parents, who have children, often ask their kids permission to marry. She expressed her concern to me about getting involved with a man who was dying. I responded that even dying people need someone to love. I was 9 years old when they tied the knot.

Not only was his heart stronger than we thought, he outlived my mother and was there beside her when she took her last breath. Now it was his turn to cross over that bridge. He was making it a battle, but I couldn’t see who he was fighting.

Life with my step-father was one long tug-of-war. He liked to be right. He’d climb over the top of anyone every time to make himself so. But just like the stack at the end of the playground game, when the struggle was over, and the bodies piled on top of each other in mud or on grassy fields filled with laughter, his embrace was welcoming and warm and without hesitation.

In this hospital room, pierced by an arrow of street lamp from the parking lot outside, my step-father was arguing with death. His face grimaced and white balls of saliva collected at the sides of his mouth as he railed at his invisible foe. The hospital sheet visibly went concave as his chest shrunk, absorbing blows from the enemy he fought.

This went on for hours. Midnight. Two o’clock. 4.

Until he simply let go of both sides of that taught rope.

Every white surface in that small, sterile room took a collective deep breath. The air softened. Although I wasn’t a participant in this battle I knew what happened. He’d had enough tugging to stretch his insides and make room for the Love.

I’d had this battle with him every week while I grew up. I lived in his house where the bills were organized and neatly pinned on a bulletin board with the date they should be mailed penciled inconspicuously on the back. He walked to the corner to mail letters one at a time. He did it to let the interest in his money market gain the largest daily advantage before being withdrawn.

“If you watch after the pennies,” he told me regularly, “the dollars will take care of themselves.” It was the details of his death he was fighting as he spit and swore. I was certain he had no doubts about the big picture.

The white room began to glow. A coral halo framed the curtain and chased away the sword of blue light from the night before. The room was still dim, but the rising sun invited me to pray. I lost all my prayers at church and I didn’t know what to say, so I simply took his hand, and between my tears I said, “Hello.”

Aloha.

I didn’t know it was Aloha that morning. I would discover that years later when I took a class from Laurie Foley. Aloha is the presence of the divine breath, the divinity that dwells within and without. It means I see the presence in you. I offer you compassion.

“Hello,” was enough. It was the butterfly crawling out from my night’s cocoon. A welcome. A greeting. An acknowledgment of all he’d given me in bills with dates on envelopes, precision and argument. My hello was the warm hug we’d shared after many fights. His eyes were closed. The bombs of saliva were gone from the corners of his mouth. And his chest rose and fell with soft breath. Hello. I see the Real You.

Later that day, when my siblings were gathered round he rallied.

The wrinkles on his face were smoothed. The tugs surrendered and let go. He opened his eyes and looked at me, deep mountain lakes stared at me from somewhere in his essence. “You’ve been with my mother,” I said to him. He smiled and nodded. He was no longer afraid.

Whatever final battle ensued during the night, Peace won. He held my hand. He went around the circle telling my siblings why he loved them. He shook my husband’s hand in the same way he had so many times and said, “It’s been such a pleasure knowing you all.” Then he died.

Aloha: I see you. My presence is with you. There is peace between us. Hello and goodbye.

What peace have you found in the midst of a battle? What surrender did you find when you let go? Where is the hello in your goodbyes? And have your feet ever been cold on a hospital floor.

I’ve been looking at cleaning out and letting go in January. I’m making the final preparations to offer a short no-cost class called Altar Your Life: A Soulful Cleanse. You can participate from anywhere that you have a telephone. If you have any curiosity about that class, send me an email with the subject line: Soulful Cleanse and you’ll be the first to know all the details. Or, if you’re a phone person, give me, Rebecca, a call: 970-210-4480.

Welcome guest blogger Stacia from MyFluffyBunnies!

One Sunday last August, I crashed a Vespa on vacation in Florence. My tibia cracked just below the knee, right there on the dusty Tuscan roadside. After four days in the hospital, I had surgery. Four days after that, my husband and I finally flew home to Romania.

Home. Reunited with our children. Sleeping in our own almost-queen-size European bed. Watching dump trucks and horses whinny past our front window. Home.

But, really, the journey was still ahead of us.

Only two months into a yearlong assignment in Romania, I suddenly had an injury I knew very little about and a wildly uncertain prognosis. I couldn’t convey simple things to my doctor because the only Romanian words I had learned were from grocery store placards and restaurant menus. And critical medications with labels I couldn’t read lined our medicine shelf.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst part came about six weeks in. The kids were in bed. My husband sat watching a movie on his laptop and headphones. My dad, who had flown 6,000 miles to help us, was taking a shower. I rested on the couch, my bad leg strategically propped up by seven pillows. Gunshots and jet engines blared in some silly action movie on the television, and the baby started to cry.

I looked at the remote control on the other couch. I couldn’t reach it. I looked at the baby’s door. I couldn’t get up to open it and soothe him. I called for my husband. He didn’t hear me. I called for my dad. He didn’t hear me. I looked and called and looked and called, a little more desperate and despairing each time.

The television roared. The baby roared. So I roared, too. I punched the couch over and over, releasing 42 days of held-back emotion. Stress. Shock. Pain. Fear. Frustration. Grief. Anger. Oh, yes, anger.

All that I couldn’t express in words, I spit out in growls and screams and rage.

And then it was done, gone, over. My dad turned down the television. My husband coaxed the baby back to sleep. I melted into the cool, soft leather of the couch. Exhausted. Sweaty. Empty. Free. Oh, yes, free.

Free to actually feel.

To feel the jarring sharpness of my bones knitting themselves back together.

To accept the utter impotence of being physically incapable of caring for my own family.

To ache for the year abroad that we had imagined and then lost.

To begin, slowly, embracing the year we would have instead, step by tentative step.

Have you ever stifled emotions unintentionally? How did it feel when you finally let them go? And how do you cope with drastic changes in your life’s plan?

I have loved Stacia’s blog because of her intimate photos. I feel like I get a regular glimpse of the altared spaces in her life. It’s been particularly fun to watch as she decided which things to take to Romania and which things to leave behind. Then, after her leg broke, it’s been a welcome journey to listen, as she sifted through her life to find what was still whole.

I’m cleaning out in January. Are there places in your home, your body or your thoughts that are cluttered or clogging you up?

I measure myself constantly. Do I measure up? Was the dinner I made tasty enough? Nutritious enough? Did I get enough exercise? Am I working hard enough to move my business forward? Cutting myself enough slack to remember that’s the formula to be kind to my family? There is always an invisible bar against which I am standing to see if I am tall enough to ride the ride of life.

Do you measure yourself as much as I do? I measure my accomplishments for sure, but I measure other things as well. I measure my mood. Is happiness the right thing to feel just now? Am I happy enough? Am I expressing my joy with alacrity?

I measure my words. Did I say that with grace? But without being a pushover?

All this implies that there is an ethereal right and wrong to the universe. That there is a big yardstick in the sky taking note of my on-course/off-course direction.

Today I pause and the break from scheduled programming. Because I just don’t buy it.

No one is measuring me but me. And I quit.

I broke the yardstick, meterstick and ruler. I crushed the compass.

I constantly break my appraisal devices with a wicked set of questions. When I question the invisible voice that demands I measure up it melts away almost as effortlessly as I broke this piece of wood with a bunch of painted lines.

I’m now allowed to laugh with abandon. Or cry without cause. I fired the one taking notes.

What altared space do you need to break to stop the silly voice in your head that asks if you’re tall enough to get on the rollercoaster of life?

If you’d like a few hints with questions to clean up the voices that beg you to constantly calibrate your performance, sign up for my open office hours this Thursday afternoon.

The simplest days are often my favorites. Sometimes I forget this. That’s why almond butter and rice cakes are my altared space today.

I’m using January to clean out and let go. My friends Demi, Sarah and Debra are leading a community cleanse. Cleansing my body is about a whole lot more than food. As a rule, I’ve resisted cleanses: fad eating.

But part of me was yearning to belong to that something beyond the food…the club of shared lifestyle. Belonging, however, begins inside my own skin.

Years ago, when my husband was in graduate school, I lived one of the most peaceful and happy years of my life. We were living on student funds which meant we had next to nothing. Removing choice from my life was oddly freeing.

I am a saver, my husband a spender and the bulk of our fights revolved around money. Removing all choices about money removed a great deal of conflict. Life became simple and I reveled in that peaceful place.

I packed picnics everywhere we went. I always have a gorgeous cooler – green at the moment – and I pack cloth napkins and sweet plates. I toss in a box of crackers, cream cheese, sundried tomato and some veggies and we go round the circle making little artful creations to pop in our mouths.

I never ever felt poor.

But graduate school ended and then came the job and with it money and choices. With choices came responsibilities and the arguments returned. Arguments leave me drained.

Perhaps it was the combination of the drained feeling and some lingering haunt of lack that had me popping by Chipolte or The Great Harvest to get a sandwich instead of packing my cooler now that there was money and choices.

My cleanse required me to get mindful about food. I had very specific things I could eat and I was aware that a long day in town would leave me hungry if I didn’t plan. So I got out my green cooler.

I was in a hurry and didn’t get fancy. I tossed in a bag of rice cakes, a jar of almond butter and some apples. But when we parked the car in the middle of errands and I opened that cooler to share goodies with my hungry car of two teenagers and a husband I love something tasty happened.

A simple nourishment descended on me. As I spread almond butter onto rice cakes and passed out apples everyone told stories. We laughed at the goofy snacks and the way the almond butter dripped. Our windows were down because the sun was heating the car, and people looked at us. “Yep, we’re just here having our granola snack in the paved parking lot. Peace out,” joked my husband. And we all crack up.

But we belonged together.

I don’t always get that cozy feeling grabbing Chipotle.

I think this is why I’m cleansing. So I can remember what nourishes me. Yes, I want to know if I have a sensitivity to glutten or dairy. But more than that I want to be sensitive to what truly feeds me. A return to the basics from time to time reminds me.

Does the food you eat affect your mood? Are you a good picnic packer? Has anyone ever laughed as you ate lunch in your car?

It would make my tummy full if you would subscribe to my blog today.

Full disclosure: this day happened to me last August. My friends really are offering their community post holiday cleanse right now, but because I just had mouth surgery and milk shakes are a big part of my life, I decided to participate with mindfulness rather than chewing. When I tried telling you that upfront everything felt clunky.

I have the post holiday blues. I had so much fun decorating cookies and skiing with Santa that the return to work this Monday was a bit of a let down even if I do adore my job. I also had mouth surgery and I find the hole in my mouth leaves a deeper hollow space. So I clean and sort to find my way back to normal, finding the holy in everyday things.

 God is in the roses, and the thorns… This lyric by Rosanne Cash epitomizes my belief that God is everywhere; even, and especially for me in the New Year, in the details of cleaning out.

 Cleaning out my purse is a small enough task that I can tackle it and feel instantly accomplished. I riffle through receipts to find the instructions for my mouth surgery before I go. I toss out a few gum wrappers. I refill hand sanitizer and switch out an empty chapstick. I finally decide the plethora of punch cards I’ve been carrying to save money are costing me my sanity. I keep the 3 I use regularly and dump the rest.

 Cleaning the fridge puts me back together. I start on the top shelf, wiping my way down as I go. Tossing out spoiled fruit and leftovers allows my brain to let go of the cranberries and popcorn that didn’t get strung. We managed to have a fabulous Christmas even if we skipped over that tradition. I let go of another layer of what makes a good mother.

As I walked my son to the bus yesterday morning and discovered the tear falling down my cheek I asked myself why the post-holiday-blues gets me. I had a truly lovely Christmas, perhaps my best ever. Yet there are still invisible expectations that tug at me. Did my children feel equally loved? Did my dad enjoy our visit?

 In short I worry.

 My cure for worry aside from reminding myself that I am in someone else’s business instead of my own is to scrub something dirty. Worry can’t see results and it wants to. Scrubbing away dirt fixes that.

 My shower has long been neglected. It was the perfect cure for my holiday blues. Can you spy that mold? I went at it with a vengeance. I attacked it to scrub away all the expectations in my children’s lives I can’t see. I washed away everything my father wants of me that I don’t have to offer.

The oral surgeon harvested a glob of tissue from my palate and sewed it onto my lower gums because I am receding. My mouth echoes my mood now and I feel hollow everywhere. After some rest my daughter and I made a blanket for her dorm room.

The texture of soft fleece rhythmically cut in 1 inch strips orders my mind and fills in the gaps. I cut, she ties and we become a team in our endeavor. Fat daises fill my mind and I imagine them filling her dorm room. The hollow feeling I had in September when she was lonely and far away is replaced by the friends she tells me about and the warmth we are making together.

 My tears dry. I am left with simple, happy holiday memories along with a few cleaner spaces, a mended mouth and a blanket to connect me to my kid who lives away.

 How do you transition between holiday time and regular-work-a-day life? What altared spaces do you use to fill in the hallow spaces left by the excited expectations of holidays?  How long does it take for mold to grow in your shower?

You might also enjoy this Rosanne Cash interview with one of my favorites: Krista Tippett. They talk about how Ms. Cash found God in music and art … and realized God might be everywhere.

Welcome guest poet Rosemerry Trommer!

No Hurry To Find Out
Joan asks me what happens after we die,
and I don’t know, but I do know
how to stand beside the river
and see a shrine in every rock I find,

which is how I spent the day yesterday.
And I know that walking today
in the snow, every step felt like
a prayer, which is to say

I feel so very lucky to be alive,
even though I don’t know who
the prayer is to—nor what the point
of praying is—except that on days like today

I overspill with gratitude
and it feels so good to say thank you
for this life that happens before we know
what happens after we die.

Walking beside Rosemerry Trommer in the black and white woods of winter as she speaks her eternal prayer of I don’t know is about as holy as it gets for me. I want the world to be black and white, full of yeses and nos. I crave certainty. I find little of it.

And yet I feel gratitude nonetheless.

I am grateful for the altared spaces of certain stones, heavy with gravity and bright red berries that smile at me. Rosemerry delivers a poem a day to the doorstep of my email inbox. Her words open up pockets in the ambiguity of life and make the confusion lovely rather than lonely.

She has written for O Magazine as well as many other periodicals and makes an appearance at A Prairie Home Companion. If you click here you’ll get to watch her perform, which will certainly make you laugh out loud. I saw myself in the green of her mother envy.

What is your prayer of repetition? Where do you find certainty? What is your bright red spot of hope as we head into a new year?

 My open office hours are today. If you are searching for red berries of hope in a sea of I don’t know, perhaps we can find them together. Sign up for no-cost coaching at rebecca (at) altaredspaces (dot) com.

Every year we find a penny and an orange in the toe of our stockings. It reminds me to be grateful for small things. I love the fresh aroma of that small ball as I peel back the skin and my nose welcomes the smell of snow and skiing and childhood winter snacks. The penny takes me to the grocery store pony and the 30 second rides my children had while I checked out and paid.

Laura Ingalls got an orange and a penny in her stocking when times were really good and she felt wealthy for these treats. She savored it in the deep of winter when fresh produce was nonexistent, eating it section by tiny section. There were Christmases when her stocking held no fragrant orange and still she wrote about the richness of her life flavored with music, family and love.

Without a doubt the best thing I’ve done as a parent is read and reread the Little House books to my children on The Island of Yummy. Snuggled close we read about Pa’s fiddle, Ma’s love of a clean home and Laura who never wanted to wear her sunbonnet because it limited her field of vision.

 
I think of the boxes and boxes of Cuties I eat. I pop two in my pocket as I walk down the street, forgetting to remember how delicious they are.

Tomorrow, as I prepare a platter of Cinnamon rolls and light candles to sing Happy Birthday to Jesus, I want to remember this Created Earth full of oranges and pony rides and children who fit so well in my arms when I read.
I want to be grateful for that luscious and vibrant color in the toe of plenty that greets me and my loving family as we sing.

What are the altared spaces in your Christmas traditions? What is the plenty that surrounds you? Does the scent of an orange make you think of snow as well?

Welcome guest author Lindsey of A Design So Vast!

In the last few years I have grown more aware of, and more intimate with, the powerful relationship I have with both light and dark, but the truth is it’s a theme that has run through my whole life. There’s no better example of this than my family’s almost-30 year participation in a traditional party on the winter solstice. That the party is referred to by almost all as “the Solstice” hints at how iconic the event has become.

The party, a black-tie ball started by family friends my grandparents’ age, is held on the 21st of December no matter what day of the week that is. Over the years my parents’ generation began hosting, and then the original host passed away, and then my parents joined as co-hosts. Through all of these rotations of years, through the cascading generations, the Solstice has endured.

The party’s central event is a ceremony, around 11:30pm, that involves Eric, the primary host, speaking to the room of about 250 guests. The ceremony is based on an ancient Mayan ritual, taught to him as a child by his father (the original host), who was a professor of Mayan history at Harvard. The lights in the old, drafty boathouse where the ball has been held forever are dimmed, Eric and the other hosts light candles, and the entire room invokes the return of the sun with a Mayan chant. The candles are lit, one to another, and slowly the room fills with candlelight.

After the candles are extinguished, the band begins playing – the same song every year, which I’ll recognize for the rest of my life, though I could not name it or sing it for you – and Eric and the other hosts begin to dance. Gradually they snowball out into the crowd, each person breaking off and starting to dance with an onlooker. Within a few minutes, usually right as we cross the threshold of midnight, there is a whirling energy in the room, reverent and slightly raucous at the same time.

I remember dancing with Vogtie, the first and original host of the Solstice, following his masterful lead, the glow of candles still practically visible in the air, a new trust in the light’s return glowing, nascent but bright, inside of me.

I’m sure many of the 250 guests come every year because the Solstice is a great party. But I swear there’s a tangible sense in the air of the meaning of the event, a heightened awareness of the way the evening sits atop a fulcrum, squarely on the turning point of the lunar year. Many of the same people come every single year, drawn back to the boathouse on that singularly dark night, on a Sunday or in a blizzard, by some power that I know goes beyond simply the call of a cocktail.

I haven’t yet brought my children to the Solstice, though I look forward to doing so. I think next year, when Grace is 10, I will introduce her to the tradition and spectacle of the evening. I look forward to seeing it all for the first time again, to seeing the candle flames flaring in the dark night reflected in her mahogany eyes, to the expression of wonder that I’m sure will come over her as she listens to 250 people intone an ancient chant in unison. Joining our voices, in a way, to the chorus of centuries of people, all invoking the return of the light, of the sun, commemorating the way this planet spins on.

And then, Grace and I will spin into the dance, echoing the great choreography of the seasons, the endless turning of dark into light and back again.

I go to Lindsey as a resource about shadow and light throughout the year because my family also celebrates the Solstice, albeit with a more intimate gathering. Lindsey allows these themes to infuse her writing until I am allowed to approach my darker sides with friendliness. Love heals, and with her insightful quotes, book reviews and ponderings I soften.

 What altared spaces do you bring to this rebirth of Light? Do you dance, hang a crystal to welcome the rainbow fairies or otherwise sing a song to the dawn?

Please subscribe to my blog.  I want to stay in touch with you.

Welcome guest blogger Kristen from Motherese!

This year Christmas falls smack dab in the middle of Hanukkah. This fact would have meant nothing to me as a child. Now it means a lot.

Growing up, I was a good Catholic girl who went to a Catholic school in a largely Catholic town. I went to church every Sunday and every holy day of obligation. Among those feast days, Christmas was by far my favorite.

Like many little kids, I loved Christmas for the presents and the reindeer and the jolly old man dressed in red. But I also loved the mystery of the nativity story, the nobility of the poor mother seeking out shelter to give birth to her child, the wise men traveling to welcome this child with gifts. I loved looking at the life-sized crèche on the altar at our church, its giant baby Jesus never making his appearance until midnight mass. I loved lying under the Christmas tree in our family room, gazing up at the constellation of lights and tinsel and glittering ornaments. The rituals of Christmas were tied up for me with everything good about childhood – innocence, wonder, security, home.

Now there is no tree in my house, no carols, no Gospel of Luke or Matthew. We don’t celebrate Christmas here. I do, but we don’t.

You see, my husband is Jewish. And this fact – coupled with my own faith tradition – seemed for a while like it might derail us. When we were dating – years before the idea of marriage ever surfaced – we thought long about the choice to be with someone of a different religion. We read books; we took online quizzes; we sought advice. We wondered how we would pull off a wedding. We wondered how our children would answer the question, “What are you?”

But then we found that we really loved each other. We couldn’t imagine not being together, not having these hypothetical children – different faiths and all. We found a way to have a wedding. We found a way to bring our three kids into the world. And we simply don’t think about it so much anymore.

But, when Christmas and Hanukkah approach, I still do.

People in the interfaith community use the term “December Dilemma” to connote the difficulty couples face in choosing a religious path for their mixed families. And indeed I feel a dilemma at this time of year, but it’s not the one that I imagined before I had kids of my own.

Our ad hoc solution for what to do about the winter holidays has been to celebrate each one with our respective families. So we enjoy Hanukkah, latkes, and candle lighting with my husband’s mother, and Christmas, the manger, and stockings with my parents. And that is nice. In fact, it is lovely.

But I worry about the future – about sending the message to my kids that holidays happen elsewhere, outside of our home. That Christmas and Hanukkah are essentially about material acquisition. That the stories behind them are easily glossed over amidst packing suitcases full of gifts and rushing out of town.

This year I will celebrate Christmas. I will sort of celebrate Hanukkah, too. And that is fine, for now. But, whether or not my husband and I eventually decide to have a tree, a menorah, both, or neither, I want to find a way to allow my kids to feel the innocence, wonder, security, and sense of home I always felt – and really still feel, with that soaring organ music and the choir singing “O Holy Night” at midnight mass – at this time of year.

I’m not worried about what we call it or how we define it; I just don’t want our kids’ childhoods to pass without creating in our own home a space for them to feel the magic I once did, to share with them an opportunity to infuse the everyday with the transcendent.

 I love visiting Kristen’s blog because she is real. I find that refreshing in a world of Facebook status posts featuring perfect remodels and happy Sunday outings. She asks questions that stop me in my tracks like “What would you name your style of parenting?”  What altared spaces provide the December Dilemmas in your home?

photo credit by The Chanel