Back in my childhood in Wyoming, my mother befriended a local ranch hand's wife, a fascinating Dutch woman who'd lived in Norway and Sweden and made the most glorious rye bread.

Aside from her bread making skills, I remember that at Christmastime she took old Christmas cards and cut them in half, then sent them to others as new.

It was my first profound experience with someone's desire to experience Christmas in abject humility.

That stuck with me for a very long time.  I wasn't sure whether she was cutting the cards because she couldn't afford new ones (as I assumed) or whether she was just being a responsible citizen of the planet and ahead of the curve on recycling (a concept we as yet knew nothing about as the 1960's gave way to the 1970's).

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I recall another Christmas from my childhood, a Christmas when we sacrificed some of our own expectations and gifts and made instead a box of Christmas food and presents for a family we knew wouldn't have a Christmas otherwise.   I still remember pulling up in the driveway of their home next to the church in the early hours of Christmas and leaving a box on their doorstep.

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Another Christmas, years ago, but not in my childhood, it was announced at church that someone had died, one of the oldest members of the parish.  The priest noted that the funeral was going to be held at a local funeral home on the morning of Christmas Eve.  He made sure to mention it more than once, and more than once during the week I heard it.  "Maybe we should go," I said to my husband.  But we put it aside.

The morning of Christmas Eve, I was running around getting more tape, more wrapping paper, more of this, more of that, when I stopped, completely still and quiet, and called my husband.

"Meet me at the funeral home in fifteen minutes," I told him.

When we arrived, we realized we were the only ones there to attend this elderly man's funeral, aside from his only living relative, a young niece, the priest, and one other person.  There were five of us committing that man to memory and honoring his life.  On Christmas Eve.  We stopped everything else we were doing and went to a funeral, then the man's niece took the four of us out to lunch and thanked us for coming.  

On Christmas Eve.

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The holidays easily fill up with this and that, coming and going, shopping and wrapping and overspending and overindulging and overscheduling, stress and expectations. 

Sometimes it's good to just get naked. 

Escape into the quiet.

Light a candle.

Simplify.

Do less.

Love more.

Think green.

Rejoice in the moment.

Sometimes it's good to just get naked.