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Preparing Our Hearts and Our Homes for Christmas
I love Christmas, and honestly, I love the preparation of Christmas — at least I love it when I don’t feel the pressure of time slipping away before I’m ready! Every year, Joy Sunday is a big day for us. We get our Christmas tree, blast Christmas music as decorate the house, and get everything ready to celebrate BIG with our family and guests who come to visit over the holidays. It’s a lovely tradition and we all look forward to it. This year was a little different. We have two children away at school and there was a packed Gaudete Sunday weekend with end of semester activities. Instead of…
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I Wish You a Merry Christmas!
As this is my lost post before Christmas, I figured it was the perfect time to wish you a Merry Christmas! I hope your Christmas Season is beautiful and full of so much joy you can hardly stand it! Try to let go of ridiculous expectations and keep the celebrations light-hearted and focused on the people in your midst. One of the things I love about being Catholic is that Christmas is a Season — which means there isn’t as much pressure to get all the Joy of Christmas packed into one day. We have days and weeks to celebrate and let the Joy of Christ really sink deep into…
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Bringing the Heart to the Home At Christmas
The phrase, “the woman is the heart of the home” may result in very different reactions, depending upon the circles you find yourself in. Some women find the title offensive and belittling — while others are totally on board with it, and can’t figure out what all the fuss is about. The truth is that our culture seems to value things like “heart” and “home-making” very little in comparison with job titles and worldly success. It tells us a lot about how out-of-whack our priorities have become, but I totally understand the struggle to make peace with a term like “heart of the home” in the career-driven culture that surrounds…
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Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! I hope your celebrations have been beautiful! Even if it hasn’t been everything you hoped for, Christmas keeps going for 12 days, and then some — so there is plenty of time to experience all that this Season of Grace has to offer. I’ve been making a conscious effort to try to live these days in a celebratory manner — despite the challenges of being part of a family business and having to take care of many practical things at year end. Many years ago, a rousing game of “paper, scissors, rock” granted me the position of CFO for our family business. Clearly I lost. It’s almost a…
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Let’s Talk About Christmas Feasting and Why It Matters
Did you know that there was a heresy in the early centuries of the Church, known as gnosticism? The Gnostics thought the human spirit was naturally good, but it was imprisoned in the body, which was naturally evil or simply an illusion. Their goal was to free the spirit from its embodied prison. Why this matters is because many of us struggle with this same heresy today. We find ourselves seeing the body as bad or evil — and spiritual things as good and in conflict with the body. It’s understandable, considering the sex-saturated, botox injected world in which we live — but the proper response to all the craziness…
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Let’s Talk About: Getting Ready for Christmas
I am not trying to freak anybody out, but Christmas is less than two weeks away. Now how did that happen?! It is coming fast! On Sunday, we will finally get our tree up and decorated — because Gaudete Sunday, people. Gaudete is Latin for “Rejoice” and it is the perfect time to raise the tree and decorate the house and to be reminded why we have been trying to sacrifice in the first place. Advent is a gift to people like you and me — people who live in a world that is always trying to frantically push the next thing we MUST.BE.DOING and NOW! It’s a way to…
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Here’s to Hoping Advent Scares the Heck Out of You — At Least a Little Bit
Advent is soon upon us. Are you ready? I must say I had planned to write a nice post on ways to live out an intentional Advent, but then this tweet from Cardinal Dolan popped up in my feed and it got me thinking. It began “I’m sorry for the frightening readings at the end of the Church year, but they are meant to make us think about the end of time…” Let me say up front that I really like Cardinal Dolan, and I think his heart is in the right place, but I honestly feel that we shouldn’t apologize for the frightening readings this time of year. In…
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Merry Christmas in 7 Quick Takes
Merry Christmas, everyone! Lots going on with year end, so I’m going to try to keep this one short, but sweet — no guarantees, but here goes. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say, so here’s my Christmas so far, in pictures. ~1~ Joy Sunday, Put Up the Tree It was one of those years where everything seemed packed into an itty bitty Advent — but we made it! We managed to find a lovely tree on the Eve of Joy Sunday and kept up our tradition of decorating the tree on Joy Sunday. I just love Christmas trees, don’t you? I never want to take…
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And…It’s a Wrap!
Happy Epiphany! (technically, it’s been moved to Sunday in the US — but for the rest of the world –Happy Epiphany!) How was your Christmas? Mine was just what it was supposed to be — sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, sometimes chaotic, sometimes peaceful — and I wouldn’t change one second of it. I know we’re still in the Christmas Season, but we’re slowly coming to the end, and all of us are beginning to look forward to a little more normalcy in our lives. Even last night, I returned home from a gathering with friends after midnight — and my baby was still up! So, though I love this time of year and…
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Small World, Big Dysfunctional Family
No doubt you’ve heard it said before, “Oh they’re a dysfunctional family”, and maybe you’re convinced that your own family is dysfunctional — you might even go so far as to think that you’re the only sane one in a big ol’ bag of nuts? If you’re the latter, I want to be at one of your family gatherings — crazy people are the best! However, I regret to inform you that you’re probably nuts yourself and just don’t know it yet 🙁 But you know what I have found myself pondering as of late — why do we expect any family to be anything but “dysfunctional”? I mean, we’re not…
