The highlights of the holidays come down to creating happiness for those around you. Don’t you find that your heart fills up when there’s laughter and the clinking of forks on plates? And then there’s the flurry of torn wrapping paper floating away from a hidden present. Derek knocked it out of the park this year. But it’s always a challenge to buy for little ones you don’t see every day. So you wait for the tell-tale signs that they like their gifts.
I don’t have photographic evidence from what transpired about fifteen minutes later. Vienna tried to capture and keep the Jeep’s remote (Ryker’s toy) as well as clutch her own smartphone-style gizmo, and screamed like an opera singer when she realized she couldn’t have both of them. I prefer to think of her on that day in the lap of her father Nick, delighted that she could get sounds and sentences out of her own new toy.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t include a quick, candid shot of Mom Tabitha watching her children happily playing.
We had lovely (and in one case, delightfully loud) get-togethers with both sides of the family. And we added a new tradition; Boxing Day dinner at the home of friends in St. Catharines. I think we’ll also adopt their habit of making our own Christmas cards for everyone. Why should Hallmark have all the fun?
In a flash, it’s over. Now it’s 2018 and my question is, if not now, when? Whatever it is that you and I have said we’re going to get done, we should get done. It’s been 14 years since Friends went off the air. Seventeen years since the 9/11 attacks. Twenty years since Bill Clinton said he “did not have sexual relations with that woman”. If not now…when.
Am I going to email you the first of each month with that question or will you email me? Here’s to pushing forward, boats against the current and into brighter days. Always.