take the best, leave the rest

holiday season is one of my favorite times of the year. i love the winter wonderland of christmas time and delight in the collective good cheer that it brings. and like the good swedish girl that i am, i am very loyal to my swedish traditions. this means having my cookie party in preparation for sankta lucia, baking lussebullar and krumkaka and making glögg with my friends. it means my christmas goat comes out of storage and my red wooden candlesticks are lit every night. it means a number of other things (like buying jars and jars of herring that few of my non-swede friends will eat) but this year i will be missing many of my holiday rituals and traditions.

this year i am staying with my sister and her family in her adopted german home. some things aren't so different here...we both have christmas markets, warm sausages for sale on the street and mulled wine too. although, each time i reach the bottom of my gluhwein mug i think where are my almonds? it is good, but it isn't glögg.

so we learn that will survive without things being exactly the same as they have been in other years. we learn to share, with family and friends, our favorite customs and traditions. we can exchange recipes and meal ideas and everything will still be delicious even if it is different. we can veer off the expected and still have some of what we need to hold on to our memories. we can maintain what means the most to us and ask others to do the same. we can learn to blend the tried and true with the novel and new.

this year we can choose to relax about the getting and the giving and the rush of holiday madness. we can choose instead to open our hearts and minds and just experience the best and most cherished things this season offers us. we can recreate what we love and leave the rest. we can pare down and still indulge.

we can celebrate simply and still have fun.

*photo: jul i bullerbyn

transplanting

labor day weekend- the final weekend of our traditional summer.

our calendars tell us there are a few more weeks until autumn officially sets in, but this weekend signals the end of our summer holidays with adults getting back to work, children heading into a new school-year. starting over… and as with all change, the end of something is really just the beginning of something new…

like plants grown from seeds - first placed carefully in a pot to sprout, then transplanted to a garden plot to spread out and grow taller, stronger, its roots reaching deeper in the ground - we too have the ability to adapt to new environments, to bear the elements and grow resilient and sturdier still.

uprooting a plant, ripping it free from the dirt that holds it and replanting it in new earth may appear traumatic, almost violent, but gardeners will tell you it is good for their roots. it gives them greater space and more nourishing soil. sometimes in the face of transition, we may feel like those plants. we may feel torn, vulnerable and confused moving from what we know to the unfamiliar and new. we may long for things to remain the same…until we remember that we too need new soil for our roots to grow deeper and stronger.

we are prepared to face a new season because of our experiences and knowledge from seasons past. in the face of change, when we are in the midst of a transformation, we are only becoming a more robust, durable and powerful version of ourselves.