{"id":1727,"date":"2013-12-15T14:31:15","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T19:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/?p=1727"},"modified":"2013-12-15T14:31:15","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T19:31:15","slug":"christmas-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/2013\/12\/15\/christmas-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2013-12-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.\u00a0 As if that isn\u2019t difficult enough add Christmas to the mix and you\u2019ve really got your work cut out for you.\u00a0 I\u2019ve pretty much got it down after five years on Stowe Lane but I can assure you I\u2019m not immune to the vortex of Christmas nostalgia.<\/p>\n

I go to a mall only one day in the season, usually with my sister so I can keep her from hyperventilating over her list; who to leave on, who to take off, who\u2019s kids are too old now, who blah blah blah.\u00a0 Mostly it\u2019s about dinner afterwards as we can breeze through one of the minor malls, on a Wednesday, when the weather is beautiful outside so no one wants to shop.\u00a0 See what I\u2019m sayin.\u00a0 What I don\u2019t do in the mall is listen to the music.\u00a0 To this day, when they get to the \u201cfall on your knees\u201d part of Oh Holy Night I\u2019m a tearful mess.\u00a0 Don\u2019t know why but it grips me EVERY TIME.\u00a0 It has shades of church nostalgia when you didn\u2019t know any better, it has shades of A Christmas Carol; I\u2019m on my knees Jacob Marley, on my knees.\u00a0 Jeez, I\u2019m killin myself over here.\u00a0 And there\u2019s the time himself was on his knees hoping for a way out of his maze.\u00a0 When you are an accidental witness to something that personal it sticks with you.<\/p>\n

The Christmas movies are making the rounds on every channel at any hour of the day.\u00a0 I don\u2019t watch them on TV; I pull out my favorites and have a heart wrenching nostalgia fest with no commercial interruption. George C. Scott is hands down my favorite Ebenezer Scrooge.\u00a0 Come home from Sandra\u2019s on Christmas Eve and in it goes, wake up the next morning and amazingly the spirits have done it all in one night.\u00a0 Just sayin.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s It\u2019s a Wonderful Life.\u00a0 In our darkest hours, in the depths of our despair I so wanted someone to come through our door with a laundry basket filled with cash to save our mess.\u00a0 I had to let that go because it didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 Now I can watch the movie and feel like a George Bailey myself, just doing the next right thing.\u00a0 But I must say there is that moment when you let yourself go back, just for a second to remember from whence you came.\u00a0 And yes Clarence, no man is a failure who has friends.\u00a0 I am incredibly rich now.<\/p>\n

I have a beautiful little tree on Stowe Lane, I put it up each year by myself but it\u2019s a different kind of put it up by myself now. There was a time when I resented putting the tree up by myself as I resented so many of the things I had to do by myself.\u00a0 There\u2019s irony in that these days, much of everything I do, I do happily by myself.\u00a0 I\u2019m starting to believe that one of the definitions of irony might just be letting go of what isn\u2019t yours.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine brought his children over for \u201ccookie day\u201d.\u00a0 Thankfully most of my serious cookies were already done so we could just enjoy watching the kids roll out, cut out, start again, decorate etc.\u00a0 They watched while I pressed the butter cookies out, both of them standing on the little chair\/stool that my sister used to sit on to watch the cookies bake in the oven when we were kids.\u00a0 There was such d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu in that moment, the sound of the cookie press hitting the cookie sheet, the giggles from the kids, I might have glimpsed a bit of what my mother experienced when she was the chief cookie baker. Makes me wonder if there will be cookies when I\u2019m her age; but that isn\u2019t mine to hold on to either.<\/p>\n

It snowed all day yesterday.\u00a0 The kind of snow that is reminiscent of Christmases past.\u00a0 Stuck in the house, the smell of cookies in the air, bundled up fun with the dogs romping through the enchanted forest, and nostalgia hanging in the air.\u00a0 Funny thoughts enter your head, like having to wait for Dad to \u201cset up the lights for the camera\u201d before you could get out of bed to see what was under the tree.\u00a0 Those cameras no longer exist and my father is gone too. \u00a0The smell of pine coming from a candle instead of the tree, I long ago let go of having a real tree when our little Dobie didn\u2019t realize the smell inside is different from the smell outside and lifted his leg.\u00a0 These were fleeting thoughts tucked in to one of the most wonderful days I could have had.\u00a0 Being stuck in the house is never a problem for me, I love my home.\u00a0 Baking cookies in my tiny little kitchen is more like choreography but I\u2019m so good at the dance.\u00a0 Spending time with children who are making cookies is always fun.\u00a0 And best of all a phone call from my friends Benno and Harumi who now live in Amsterdam.\u00a0 Lively conversation, picking up where we left off, laughing, sending love across the wires is an amazing gift.<\/p>\n

If I were to sum up the Christmas season and how best to get through those flashes of nostalgia, I would say to honor them.\u00a0 Feel them all the way through, take the moment and know that whether it is happy or sad it has made you what you are in this moment.\u00a0 Enjoy the season, remember what it really stands for and go with that.\u00a0 Make yourself engage even if it\u2019s hard, we are watching a friend of ours deny all that is joyful and it\u2019s breaking our hearts.<\/p>\n

From all that I was to all that I have become I know like I know there truly is balance in the holding on and the letting go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.\u00a0 As if that isn\u2019t difficult enough add Christmas to the mix and you\u2019ve really got your work cut out for you.\u00a0 I\u2019ve pretty much got it down after five years … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[364,358,355,363,362,360,359,361],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pause-points","tag-a-christmas-carol","tag-christmas","tag-cookies","tag-fall-on-your-knees","tag-its-a-wonderful-life","tag-kids-baking","tag-nostaligia","tag-putting-up-the-tree"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27hQ5-rR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1728,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions\/1728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}