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Retrospective
By Betsy Richter | 1:53 pmIt’s been an interesting four days.
The kids are gone on their usual Christmas celebratory long weekend with their father. Since I no longer celebrate Christmas & their Jewish father does? It’s a win-win for us all: I get some much-needed alone time, while they get the gifts they’d not get here anyway plus extra time with their Dad. And I’m much more calm about it than I’ve been in years past — even the reappearance of the Christmas boxes from the basement (used to decorate someone else’s tree) didn’t make me want one of my own this year.
I’m much more calm in general, I think. Where being the fifth wheel at an aggressively-coupled event used to throw me for a loop, I now bill myself as comic relief & escape when it gets a bit much. Or I schedule my own fun, take my own breaks — do what *I* want to do.
This holiday weekend? One of the best ever. Whether it was having an impromptu Christmas Day dim sum brunch with friends, a relaxed Christmas dinner with friends I’ve known for years, phone calls or Facebook updates to relatives now miles away, or time spent curled up on the couch with a glass of wine, my music & a book — it was more than I expected; far more than I could have asked for.
My more material friends will certainly want to know — “What’d you GET? What’d you BUY?” And they’ll be bitterly disappointed with the lack of a tangible haul of gifts, of stuff.
But I was blessed in oh, so many intangible ways. Whether it’s the joy of finding the perfect gift for a mostly-housebound parent who loves her television (year-long Netflix subscription FTW) or the chance to reconnect with people I’ve let slip away for far too long or the opportunity to say ‘thank you’ or ‘you matter’ or ‘I love you’ to the people in my life now? All priceless.
I know that 2009 has been a brutal year for many, and I’ve been lucky to escape most of its wrath. But I’ve been lucky in oh, so many other ways this year. And I have this funny feeling that my luck just might continue on into 2010…
…but only if you’re part of it as well.
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