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

free to be you and me...

so i have just returned from two weeks in germany visiting my baby sister and her two very own babies - my four year old niece and ten month old nephew.

in full keeping in my role as indulgent auntie, i put my niece to bed every night with at least four stories and laid with her in her small wooden bed until her breathing was deep and slowed by sleep. most nights we closed our eyes in the dark and listened to quiet music after story time was over. one of her current favorites was also one of my own at her age, “free to be you and me”. i know, i know,  it is the seminal anthem of all gen x-ers; i didn’t say this wasn’t cliché…

but the first night i was resting with her and i heard those familiar first chords of the banjo strike, i was jolted by a powerful nostalgia. my eyes filled with tears and i worried i would cry and disturb her entrance into sleep. my own hopes and dreams inspired by that album as a child paled by the welling in my heart for my hopes and dreams for her. as she curled next to me, her small, thin four year old arms wrapped around my neck i said a silent prayer that she would always be so happy and confident in her own voice and choices, that she would always feel strong enough that when faced with wearing competing sparkly shoes, she would wear one of each and think it looks great. i hope she always has the confidence to make her own decisions, voice her own opinion and that she grows to be the kind of woman she wants to be.

i made the choice long ago not to be a parent and i am grateful for the role models i had that seemed content with their decision to be childless. it wasn’t always easy to find them. because i am quite obsessed with my nieces and now my nephew, i am sure many people thought (or do think) that i just missed the boat and maybe regret my choice. i don’t.

it was a different time, my childhood in the seventies, and i think maybe in terms of non-conformity and acceptance, a better time, but maybe i am just jaded in my old age. i remember primary-colored big wheels, working class families on tv, enjoli perfume adds (i can bring home the bacon dum dum dee dum and fry it up in a pan…) and pumpkin colored turtlenecks for me and my brother...i don’t remember feeling so aware of gender or race like today. maybe i owe some of my own ideas of equality and strength of character to the spirit of “free to be…”