Under the Oaks: Holiday Your Way
What I've learned about celebrating.
Welcome to Under the Oaks, a quiet place to sit and read in the Land of Oaks and Roses.
I have a story for you. My good friend, Claire, and I celebrate a lot together throughout the year. Our families celebrate a similar mix of holidays, and we can walk to each other’s houses. Claire also happens to be someone who grows her own basil and flowers and more. She’s a beautiful host. Between the two of us, there’s high potential for holiday magic. Our ever present potential! It’s wonderful. It’s also a source of exhaustion.
When Rosh Hashanah rolled around in the Fall, we decided to do things differently then we had the year before. We accepted the fact that we were both tired. We got inspired by our real lives. Our real lives that week were that we had four kids who wanted to play outside (the weather was gorgeous), and two non-Jewish husbands who wouldn’t get home from work until later than we wanted. We scrapped our homemade dinner plans and brought a tablecloth to the playground instead. We let go of control of who would show up when. We ordered pizza from the place the kids love. We added apples, honey and $3 kid shofars from Amazon. We caught the kid’s easygoing glee, and we celebrated. We made meaning. Together. No moms were exhausted in the process. And you know what? It’s one of my favorite holiday memories.
We showed our kids, especially our daughters, that the door between us and magic isn’t so heavy after all. It’s one of those days I’ll look back on when my kids are big and think, wow, I was able to listen to myself instead of all the noise around me when I was a mom of little kids. I think I’ll feel proud.
I’m clear about what I want my holidays to be about: presence with the people I love. For me, that presence requires energy and ease. The moral of the story is this: You're free to do whatever you want for the holidays. Let me say that again. You're free to do whatever you want.
Some good questions I ask myself before any holiday:
Do I need to do this or am I choosing to do this?
Do I want to do this?
Ok, I want to do it. Will I have the energy? This question requires a follow-up note: “be honest with yourself Olivia.”
I want to do it and have the energy, but do I want to do it with a two and five-year-old? This one requires acceptance of what these ages are capable of. There are so many things I want to do with my kids but what I actually want is to do them with a seven and ten-year-old, which will happen! Just not this year.
Small, Beautiful Things
3 great gifts from the shop that will deliver by 12/25:
The Aura Frame - Great for a partner’s desk, grandparent and more.
Skiing Puzzle - So cozy! Great for anyone.
Easy Playhouse - Great for kids. A craft (they can color on it etc.), group play situation and more that goes out with the recycling when you’re done with it.
See you next week!
Your Own List
My best advice for this weekend: be true to your own list. One thing the sales really help me with is working through my to-do list faster than I otherwise would. There’s so much that needs to get done between now and the end of December! I think for all of us, one of those things is gifts. Soooo….
Brain Break
First things first: a heartfelt thank you for all the gift guide love! It’s so special to see you loving and benefitting from them.
Separating Behavior From Identity
I have a small, very close sisterhood of friends who I talk to everyday. The thing I love most about our conversations is we are just as likely to talk about a good pair of boots as we are about trauma. Our conversations are uncontained, and in them we get to be too. I'm very curious about feeling uncontained, about feeling free, which is probably because I spent most of my life feeling the opposite (growing older, what a relief). A friend in the aforementioned sisterhood recently sent us her notes from a podcast she had just listened to. One bullet point jumped out at me: "We collapse behavior into identity." It made me think of myself in my teens and early twenties. I’m not sure that I knew how to define someone other than by their behavior. And I definitely used what I did (or didn’t do) on any given day to define myself. This sounded like “I got into x school, I am smart” one day and, “I didn’t get into x school, I am an idiot,” the next.