With the craziness of the holiday season, the opportunity to post here has been buried. In addition to spending time with our family for the holidays, we took on some home projects right before Thanksgiving. At times it seemed we were crazy to add such a large project to the predetermined holiday madness. However, we knew with a deadline in place our success would be greater.
Time to Paint the House
That’s right, about the 10th of November we decided to take on some redecorating. We have discussed repainting the interior of our home for about a year already. Knowing that history repeats itself there was the fear that if we waited until, after Christmas, another year would pass and again not get done. So away we go.
One thing leads to Another
As if painting the walls wasn’t enough of a project, we decided we wanted our trim to be white. Knowing that it would be easier to paint without trim, we started there. Painting trim sounds much easier than it really is. We attempted many techniques before we found our best solution. (That cries out for a post in itself, I’ll work on that soon). Once we completed the trim, we started on the walls, which lead to the front door, and so on. Our initial goal was to only do the primary color and call it good until after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the colors did not work well together so we had to continue on to our accent walls as well. Oh and did I mention that the kids we motivated for fresh paint too? The good news is we found our happy place before Thanksgiving and we were able to enjoy the holiday season with a great start on our home re-decorating projects.
On to the Holidays
A Season of Traditions
Thanksgiving and Christmas is a season of traditions for many. We generally spent Thanksgiving with my parents. I think this started when we had distance and jobs to contend with. Since we would have four days off we could spend more time together. We would travel four hours one way, which was more difficult for a standard weekend or even the Christmas day, so Thanksgiving just became a tradition. Once my parents moved closer this changed. Since we had more space and three energetic children, It began to make more sense to gather at my house. In a small family, the passing of loved ones means traditions will change as well. Now our celebration has become very intimate, generally just our little family. This year we were fortunate this year to be able to enjoy Thanksgiving with more of our family.
Seeking New Traditions
In 2019 we were fortunate to get two very large projects off of our plate. We had a business that we sold in 2018, in early 2019 we finished all the work that was necessary to put that behind us. In addition, we were able to close my parent’s estate. These were two projects that were very time consuming and emotionally draining. It has been discovered that when a plate is cleared of time-consuming and emotional events that creativity can be found. We also learned how contagious the loss of creativity can be among loved ones. In years past I would produce hand made Christmas cards. For several years now we would design and print our cards, but the personal creativity was very limited. This year we made it a priority to schedule the time to hand create each card that we sent out. It felt good to have the desire to create again, and again we have found that creativity is contagious.
When did December get so Short
It seems as though the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas seems to be getting shorter every year. Heading into December we discuss all kinds of ideas and plans for the month. Then suddenly it is 10 days until Christmas and then with the blink of an eye, it’s Christmas Eve and Christmas day and half of those plans never made it to fruition. We did, however, manage to make a few new traditions this year. For the first time, we had a family night doing gingerbread houses. It was immediately decided that this would be added to the traditions list in years to come. Although the month went fast, we were able to spend time together as a family making new memories.
A New Year a New Decade
Now that the year has come to a close, we hopefully will be able to tuck the craziness of the holidays away for another year. Moving forward it is time to make goals for the new year. As for a personal goal I am hoping to become more involved with this blog as well as making more time for creativity. As a family, we are working together on creating more both personally and professionally, as we have multiple projects in the cue. In addition to physically assisting each other, we will continue to support and encourage each project as it moves forward.
