A Note of Encouragement

*If you’d like to listen or watch, click here.

The thing no one tells you about Christmas as a kid is that sometimes, as an adult, the holidays are terribly hard.

​By the way…

*If young children are present and you’re watching or listening to this, you might want to send them in the other room for this recollection of one of my Christmas Eves as a child.

It’s Christmas Eve - one of my favorite days of the year as a kid. For my family, Santa always showed up on this night, usually after my dad had taken my sister and me on a ride to see Christmas lights or some other errand that simply could not wait, to give my mom the time she needed to get everything ready.

One of my favorite memories is from a Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house. My sister and I had been taken on a drive to see the lights around town with my dad and my uncle John. I don’t know how old I was, but I was on the cusp of not believing anymore.

As we were driving around, the two adults got so excited about some lights they saw in the sky. They pointed them out to us, something they could both clearly see, but neither of us could. They were watching Rudolph’s shining nose as it tracked across the sky. I was baffled. Rudolph was real? I certainly couldn’t find the light they were so excitedly talking about.

Then, as we returned to my grandma’s house, following the mysterious light I couldn’t see but assured them I could, as we raced into the house following them, we chased them to the back door, where we actually heard a jingle bell as Santa snuck out the door and out of sight.

Disappointed, but faith restored in Santa, we journeyed back through the house to the Christmas tree to find that the presents had doubled since we’d left on our drive. It was a magical experience and a treasured memory.

​However

But Christmas, or any major holiday, is a time of extremes. It can be the best of times, or the worst of times. If you’ve had a rough year, it seems all you notice are the happy people around you celebrating.

I know there are people within my family and my community who are struggling. It’s hard to put on a smiling face when people you love are no longer here, or you know their time on Earth is short. I’m not here to tell you that pain isn’t real. It is. You should absolutely feel all those feelings because life can be terribly sad at times.

But it can also be wonderful, and so often, when we’re sad, it’s hard to find the good.

My You Are a Badass calendar recently had a wonderful exercise that I’d like you to try right now. It said, glance around the place you’re in for one full minute, looking for anything red. Try it. Notice all the red things around you. How many did you find?

When you were looking around the room, how many yellow things did you see? Definitely not as many as the red items, right?

What a great reminder that we see what we look for. I’ve tried a similar exercise suggested by Mel Robbins. She encourages people to find heart shapes in nature. Once I started looking, I found heart-shaped rocks, leaves, and even branches lying in a heart shape.

Sarah Ban Breathnach advises her readers to search for the Sacred in the ordinary, as she certainly does in her book Simple Abundance.

Again, I’m not here to make light of anyone’s feelings of sadness, especially at this time of year. Your feelings are real and should be felt and expressed. Life can be awful and amazing and full of hurt, and full of happiness, all at the same time.

My Christmas wish for you is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep moving forward, no matter how slowly you have to do it, and always, always keep looking for the good.