Christmas Hearts & The Gift of Time

It is a rare and darkening mood I find myself in these days. Usually during the holidays, in all those candied days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I walk around in some kind of blissful euphoria, giving in to that pleasant anticipation of the warm and happy memory-making to come. These days however, I feel immune to the charms of what has always been my favorite time of year. I feel numb to it. Pedestrian. The initial blossom of joy I felt after setting up the tree and decorations has faded somehow. I try to keep up all the appearances for the sake of my daughter, who has embraced all things Christmas with the unbridled excitement of a second grader. She should not be denied all the wonder of the season, all the joy, all the "feels". It would be tragic if I let my perpetual shadow cast a pale over her holly jolly world. It is somehow fitting that the prompt, on the day I recommitted to blogging (in hopes it would help my slip and slide), would be one about the "Christmas Heart". Writing to prompts is always a challenge and it is through challenges that I have always improved my writing. So....onto today's challenge.


"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 1443 November 29, 2017
Prompt: "Let us remember that the Christmas heart is a giving heart, a wide open heart that thinks of others first." What are your thoughts on this?

It is no secret that people feel naturally open to charity on the holidays. During Thanksgiving and Christmas, the very virtual of the holidays ask us to reflect on our blessings. In that time of reflection and gratitude, many of us are compelled to pay those blessings forward, to pass on the good fortune and help others. In the wake of Cyber Monday, we now have Giving Tuesday. Yesterday my Facebook feed erupted with friends and colleagues promoting causes - a wide array of charities worthy of donations and support. It is easy to have a Christmas heart during the holidays when we are surrounded by warmth and merriment, when we are moved by the spirit of giving. And that is truly wonderful...however, being charitable and openhearted shouldn't be just another part of the holiday season. When we take the tinsel down and put away the new gifts, shouldn't we still think about others? Shouldn't we still be present, be aware, be willing to pay it forward? Should the Christmas Heart just be stowed away in the back of the attic with the artificial tree? I think that for some that may be the case. Certainly it gets harder in this world to remember others when our own struggles become difficult. It is harder to keep that Christmas spirit once the carols fade and the curbs are covered in dirty snow. The challenge for us all as human beings is to maintain that giving and charitable heart all year round. It isn't just about donations either, its about kindness and acceptance. Its about thinking of others and understanding that we may never know the battles that people are fighting inside and so being kind should be our default setting. In this world today, we could all use more random acts of kindness, more year-round Christmas hearts.


DAY 1840: November 29, 2017
Prompt: “One can never have enough socks," said Dumbledore. "Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
What can you never get enough of? Is this something that people don't give you as a gift on a birthday or other gift giving holiday?

Over the years one of my favorite gifts to receive were books. I am a very tactile reader. I prefer the rigid bindings, the smell of the paper pages...the experience of crawling into bed with a good book. I have always shunned the e-readers and kindles. I dreamed of having one of those libraries that some mansions have with floor to ceiling shelves and one of those sliding ladders to pursue all the assembled titles. Reality has revealed the impracticality of such a dream. I don't have a room to spare for any such collection. Even the anthologies and magazines in which my own stories appear are relegated to one or two shelves in the closet of our spare room. And while I still love getting a good book for a gift, there is a necessity (and thankfully), a joy in passing it along to someone else to read and enjoy. Books aside, these days I think the one gift I can never get enough of may be time. As a working mom, I have such appreciation when someone tells me take some time for myself. When someone gifts you an hour or two of free time to "just do what you want to do"...its priceless. Having a few hours to myself to do something I want, like read a book, is the best possible gift.

Mona Lisa Smiles and the Climb

The summer here in the Northeast is winding down, a fact that seems to be registering in my daughter as she welcomes her last few days of sunlit freedom. We scramble to provide the last play date, day trip and summer-flavored adventure we can fit in as the first day of school approaches. I was looking at her this morning, tan and leggy in her favorite shorts, and I had to marvel at how beautiful she wears the summer. She is natural and comfortable in soft shirts and flip flops. Her hair is a shade lighter and her skin has toasted to a rich mocha which brings out her vibrant sea green eyes. She has matured this summer and its much more obvious when those little girl loose teeth are hidden by her shy, Mona Lisa smile. She looks older, less childlike. The hints of the young woman she will be are there in her candid postures and her quiet moments. I see those delicate lines of grace and poise and I find myself transfixed by her sudden and exotic beauty. My daughter is lovely and graceful in all the ways I failed to be at her age. I had been, and still very much am, a pale and ordinary child of Winter. This Summer has been good to her. It has wrapped her in its warmest embrace and made her golden.

"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 899 August 24, 2016
Prompt: "The Young and the Restless" has just celebrated it's 11,000th episode. With that in mind, what are some of your favorite episodes of your life? You can talk about your bad ones as well. I look forward to reading your entry.

I have had my share of bad episodes for certain but they are far outweighed by the good ones. A highlight reel of those good episodes would look a lot like your typical trip down memory lane with all the requisite milestones; high school graduation, first day of college, first day meeting my soul sister, a first date with the future husband, our wedding, the birth of our daughter...all those same really big "good ones" that anyone with a blessed life can claim. There has been so much more light than darkness, even if at times it seemed as if darkness was all I was due.


"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 1379 August 24, 2016
Prompt: "But why did you go there in the first place?"

The end of the light came with surprisingly little drama. Like the final flicker of a dying match, the space around her winked into darkness. Mallory shifted her body in the narrow space, resting her back against the ledge. She slowly stretched one leg out, the tendons protesting, until her boot hung loosely out over a precipice that was darker still. Night was here and with its arrival, the knowledge that she had spent five hours alone trying to navigate the face of the evil Bodner's cliff washed over her.

Stuck. Five hours into her climb, Mallory had to admit to herself that she was stuck. Now having lost the light, she would be forced to wait out the night from her perch, facing long hours in which she would ask herself over and over how she had made such a deplorable decision to attempt this climb alone. She would think about her cell phone, mocking her from were it sat in her jeep's cup holder and her water bottle at the bottom of a ravine. Mallory had dropped it when she landed on the ledge, had listened to it clack and crack against rock the whole way down. She had cursed then, a stream of the worse obscenities she could muster.

Mallory had billed this climb as an empowering rise above a bad divorce. She was going to tackle the toughest cliff she could find in the fifty miles radius around the apartment she'd been forced to vacate and she was going to "climb the hell out of that bitch!". The arduous ordeal would be a catharsis. It would help her heal. The few friends she had managed to keep in the divorce had cheered her on. Her parents had upgraded her best climbing gear. Mallory had felt ready. She had not been. The cliff had bested her in the end.