Embracing Life

This holiday season has been particularly rough on my family. Just a little more than a week ago we lost everything we owned because of toxic mold found in our home. Losing everything is difficult but losing everything right before the holidays is a crime! When mold is found in a home, usually it can be re-mediated by a Mold Specialist, but when you have a soupy mixture of 10 different types of mold and three of them are the toxic type and found in high concentration, a person doesn’t have much choice but to flee their home and get rid of everything they own.

We fled our home last week and made our way west across the United States to New Mexico.  Right now, each of my family members has two outfits and some personal care products. We needed to rent a temporary furnished home until we can find something suitable for us and start rebuilding our lives.

With us moving and losing everything, all our money has gone into flights, a rental car, food and those few necessities…so what do we do about the fact that Christmas is only two days away and we have nothing for our family this year? I mean, sure, we could go out and purchase a few small items for each of them to open, but is that what the holidays are really about? This year, for Christmas my children will be waking up in a strangers house and in a strange new land. None of our cherished possessions which make our house a home are here. The sites and smells of our home are gone, permanently erased from our lives in one fell swoop. All the things that brought them comfort are no longer accessible to them. How do we embrace this new time in our lives and show our children we can make this work regardless of what our life may look like right now?

My children have always loved the holidays…what child doesn’t, right?  Each year after Thanksgiving we chose our tree, pulled out the decorations and would reminisce about where each ornament came from. If they were delicate ornaments, the kids would sit and talk about how the arm broke off of the snowman three years earlier, or how the head fell off the reindeer when they were fighting over ownership of that precious piece and wanted first dibbs of putting it on the first branch. Our memories were tied to each ornament and each one had a story and a life of its own. They would sit and say “Awww! I remember this one, I made it in the first grade.” And as they would take out their fragile paper plate cotton-ball snowman with one eye missing, and stick arm planted in the head,  they would just smile fondly and talk about the day they made it. They loved to watch me sort through the lights, inspecting them to make sure they worked, and they would impatiently fidget as I strung the lights around the tree. Even though they didn’t like a lot of the hokey Christmas songs, they would begin to hum and then sing them out loud. They loved to sit at night with all the lights off and just stare at our beautiful tree, wondering when we were going to put out the gifts. Part of the suspense for them was not knowing when we would bring out the gifts to be displayed, and when we would bring them out, they would size up each one, checking to see if their sisters or brother got more then them. They loved to read the tags too, because we always put something quirky or obscure on the tags just to make them smile.

Christmas Eve was spent going to see family and opening gifts from relatives who would always say “Wow, look how big you got!” They were always glad to hear that, and then would get mildly disappointed because “wow, look how big you got” meant I got you something based on how little you were last year!  But the children took it in stride and were grateful for the gifts they did receive.

Christmas morning comes with excitement and joy not so much because of the gifts…but because of our tradition for Christmas morning! They know they are getting the gifts because they have been looking at them for sometime now, but it is the anticipation for when WE were gonna wake up and tease them all morning. They knew they would need to wait till we had our coffee, made our breakfast, and sit down to chat for a while. I don’t know how or when that started, but it became a razzing tradition and one that they would laugh and talk about each Christmas morning amongst themselves.  We would always stand within an earshot of them and listen to them talk about past Christmas mornings and how they had to “wait.” But they loved every second of it.

The time would come for them to each open gifts and the youngest one that was able to read was the designated present picker. They had the honor of handing out the gifts to each person in the family…it was a proud honor to hold that position in our household. By the time we are done opening our gifts, they are ready to display them under the tree in the order of their choosing and then it’s time to help make our Christmas Dinner.

Life in our home at Christmas time was always very special to us…but not because of the mystery of things wrapped and longed for. It was the traditions that we created as a family and the joy of being together.  The spirit of that tradition lingers on in our new life, and now it’s time to create some new traditions as well as continuing the ones cherished from the past.

As we begin this new journey and build new memories, what are some traditions that you fondly remember…maybe we will incorporate some new ones for Christmas this year.

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