Drawing by Sheila ©2010

Everyone handles the holidays differently as is very evident by all of the postings about it.  My late husband taught me some valuable lessons about holidays.

Holidays have become something about expectations...not being focused on what it is making it a holiday in the first place.  When you expect to receive gifts isn’t the idea of the gift of giving lost?  I believe it is.  When you are expected to appease someone else’s expectation by giving them whatever it is they want isn’t it putting unwanted pressures on you as the giver?  Of course it is.  Isn’t it completely unrealistic to ask someone else to make you happy when really the only person who is responsible for your happiness is you?

My husband’s family didn’t rush out to buy birthday gifts or Channuka or any other gifts every year.  The element of the surprise would be lost.  So they gave each other gifts when there was no special holiday, but rather when they saw something the person would like, or actually needed.  Imagine receiving presents for just being you, no excuses, no planned event, just because you are loved and someone was thinking of you.

Yes I will admit it took me awhile to get the hang of it, and in some ways I was not able to give up my own Christmas expectations, but I learned how to focus them more on what I wanted to do not buy, rather than what was expected of me.

Lance didn’t care if I had a Christmas tree or three of them, he actually thought they were beautiful and he adored how festive they made the house look and smell.  He loved me for assembling an elaborate Christmas Village above our mantle, one which grew to be five streets and numerous houses and accessories.  He never complained when I hung stockings on the fireplace for the both of us, our dogs and my son.  It merely added a festive dimension to our already wonderful home.  The freshly baked cookies filled the air with sweet aromas he helped me to make and eat.  I always had our house decorated by Thanksgiving because I made the big dinner for the families and it was part of my own tradition.

But over time we began our own tradition of going away for Christmas and New Years.  We began taking a cruise somewhere warm and sunny, spending our days with new friends who would become old friends.  Our gift to each other was in spending the time together, concentrating on us and appreciating the fact we could get away.  In reality it was a perfect time to go, everyone else was so wound up trying to make a perfect holiday, rushing to buy something for all the people on their lists, fighting the traffic jams, the lines in the stores, the frenetic buying...well, we just had enough of all of it.  Besides no real work was happening for those who were not in retail.

Last year we had planned our trip right after the one we finished but I ended up going on it alone.  In retrospect it was perhaps the final gift I ever got from him.  Though I was not at all sure how it could have been at the time.  

His dying gave me strength to go on living as I had never done before.  Was it weird?  Yes, and I would not be honest if I didn’t say sometimes it still is.  But were it not for the confidence he taught me, the fearless way he lived and died I doubt I would have become what I am today.  I never knew who I was without him.  Thirty years with someone can blend you and bend you.  But as I approach this year I see how beautiful life is, and the problems we all have...well they are just temporary, we don’t take them with us.  He may have left me some problems, but the good things he taught me will live far longer than any of the problems.  

I spent the other night rereading the posts I wrote when he was in the hospital, and when he died.  I honestly don’t remember writing them, nor the details I wrote.  I’m so grateful to have those to go back to now.  I could not have read them before now.  It’s only now am I fully able to be appreciative of the generous support you all showed me then and continue to.  I know many of them are no longer here for their own reasons, but the “gifts” of your support and kind words have gotten me to this place in life.  Thank you for helping me to find new reasons to live and love.

I will be going away again this year.  I know it will be different yet again, but I am positive the experience will be a gift that cannot be found under any tree.  True gifts are experiences which enrich our soul.