How I Learned to Let Go and Love the Holidays

This holiday season I’m being prompted to do more with less. I find I have no interest in spending a lot of money on gifts, nor have I bought into the ‘crazy busy’ intensity of Christmases past.

It’s been this way ever since my daughter Teal died in 2012. The only thing that really matters to me is extracting the peace of the season, the golden threads that are in the everyday.

And they are there, shining more brightly than usual.

I walk through Whole Foods and revel in the sheer display of chocolates –Dark Chocolate bars with coconut and mint! Ginger bread this and eggnog that. Dungeness Crabs stacked up like gold bars, ready to take home and eat right now.

I walk out of the store with nothing but my senses refreshed. I don’t have to own these things, or even give them. I can just observe. Somehow that is enough.

It’s as if my heart has been stripped so clean by the flow of life that there is no longer any resistance to what is. So I become sensitive to the beauty inherent in everything.

I no longer need to give gifts out of duty, or impress anyone with what I’ve chosen. Nor do I need to labor over homemade presents that cost so much and take so long that I end up hating them.

I’ve been letting myself just feel my way along this holiday season, without having any particular plan. So there is no Christmas tree. No annual Christmas letter. No weeklong deep immersion in cookie baking. None of those things seemed right.

Instead, I walk in the park and enjoy the sun coming through the trees and the mud underfoot. It puts me in a generous mood, a life-loving mood. Suddenly I’m inspired to make really good granola for my yoga teacher, Kashi. Why? Because I want to!

Will she be giving me a gift? I highly doubt it and who cares? She has made an enormous difference in my life this year. Then I think of a book that I simply have to give my son – he will love it! Which takes me online to order it. Which is when I bump into a rap poetry video that inspires buying the CD for my sister in law.

I can’t even connect these dots, except to say that flow is present.

On my daughter’s birthday I walk the streets of San Francisco where she lived and died. I stop for ice cream because it’s a special day. Sitting in the sun eating a scoop of roasted banana-fudge, I get inspired to buy my ex-husband a jar of really good fudge sauce. He loves hot fudge. We created two amazing children together … so why not?

Then there are the moments when I choose not to buy a gift. Like the Mexican tin Christmas ornaments I almost bought this morning. I took a moment to check in and realized that old unconsciousness had crept in. I was in auto-grab, needing to compensate for something lacking – I couldn’t even say what.

I put down the ornaments, walk out into the sunlight and smile. I feel utterly free this holiday season … free to be me, loving life just as it is.

That’s when I realize this is all new. For so many years I kept it together, forcing my life into a tightly coil of perfection, especially at the holidays. But all that is gone now.

In a flash I understand: this is the same free-spirited joy Teal lived every day of her life. “Just be, Mom!” she used to jubilate. I never had any idea what she meant, but now … I know.

So I give myself the best gift of all this holiday season as tears of joy run down my cheeks.

Happy Holidays.

 

 

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