Love, Hope , Peace and Faith

Truly a victim of the sappy holiday love stories. The ones where you laugh till you cry. The emotional fool that I am always cries at the movies. It's been a gray kind of day, little sunshine, let me correct that no sunshine, no wind and the stillness is eerie and a silence where the loudest thing is my thoughts. But on a good note I had a good night sleep and made it thru the night without waking up once.
Expectation has always been one of my weaknesses.Believing that everyone is looking through my "rose colored glasses" Oh yeah I have been here before, tried getting different colored lenses. As the holidays approach I have done quite a few reality checks. The children and I use to attend Mr Bell's tree farm every year get a ride in his tractor and agree not to disagree which tree we were selecting. Unfortunately Mr. Bell passed away last year. So  I slid the artificial tree out from the spare bedroom, found out all the strings of christmas lights don't work. Well I think they call the lights throw aways in this day and age. You don't have to spend the day trying to figure out which one doesn't work, you just toss and buy new. I am cheating on cookies this year, yes there is such a thing as a bakery. I have started playing Christmas music in the car I think that is part of my self torture which falls under expectation that you are to enjoy the holiday. No one writes Christmas cards anymore you get an email with a smiley... oh yeah they renamed smileys, they are now Emoji's. We use to attend church together as a family , one son and his wife claims to be agnostic, the other son and his wife atheist. Which is great I told them that shortens my holiday shopping list. Oh no but it doesn't stop there not one of them attends our church, I have a future son in law who happens to hate our religion so that finds me attending service with my youngest son and my best friend Kay.
  Something is missing since the children have grown up ...my roles have changed I am no longer Mr and Mrs Claus, the baker and the candlestick maker and sometimes I just wonder who I am. Oh yeah they still love to eat ...I am still the cook. lol
The Matriarch the one person who keeps all the family together. Much more difficult task than you would imagine. Especially with extended family. I am putting it in writing, when it comes to daughter  in laws I fell short . Kind of that horrible chant my mother in law use to say
" a son is a son till he takes a wife a daughter is a daughter for the rest of your life." She was a cruel women. Now that I got that off my chest ....I should refrain from negativity and think about the expected snowfall. Procrastinating I forgot to call the wood guy , because I put his phone number in a safe place and forgot where the safe place was ... but thanks to St. Anthony I found it clearly right in front of me. As I yell out oh yes there will be heat!!! lol
I thought about as a child what Christmas meant, the season started with Grandma and mother taking us downtown and my sister and I trying to get a view of the animated store windows through a crowd of adults and than waiting in the cold for the holiday parade to start.
But spiritually there was something special about the holidays, it wasn't about gifts because we didn't typically receive gifts in the usual sense but it was a season that had us hoping and believing  the world would come together in peace. Well than as they say peace starts at home.
I thought a lot about my grandmother over the years she outlived so many friends and family members. I never really understood how she felt or what that meant to her. She was always cheerful  and as an adult looking back I know that she must have suffered silently though she never expressed it. I never once saw her cry.
I have mixed emotions this year as my youngest son has joined the military. He hates hearing it but he will always be the baby. Way too much like his mother, I gave him heads up warnings. Be aware of your surroundings, the rest of the world is not Greene County , keep your emotions intact, don't think with your heart, to treat others as you want to be treated, apply the carpenter's rule to life " think twice act once"  remember to always say the Lord's Prayer.



I hope tomorrow finds you happy
and you'll see the magic of dreams.
from the moment you awake and
until you're fast asleep.

May peace be the blanket
to comfort that heart of yours
while knowing our lives have
so much more in store.

Faith is rather simple
trust in how you feel,
have the confidence
that allows a heart to
heal.

All of it comes together
wrapped up in a bow of love,
tightly woven together
from earth to the heavens above.


I wish everyone a Christmas holiday filled with just that, Love, Hope , Peace and Faith.