Oh the holidays….  they are here!  They are so exciting!  Chock full of beauty, waist deep in tradition, and a to do list so long it makes my head spin.  While I am second guessing our ideas for gifts my boys (rock wall in basement), crafting up a storm for friends and family (secrets!!), bundling things to donate, decking the halls, peering into advent calendars, and generally having a merry old time, I am trying oh so hard to focus on what it is that is special about this season to me.  When I lift up the dusty veil into my memory, its decorating the tree, cramped car rides, santa’s lap, carols onstage at the towns christmas tree lighting, ballets at nursing homes and salt dough ornaments that I see.  It is my brother sleeping on my trundle-bed christmas eve, the way the lights look at four a.m, the smell of bacon and coffee.  It’s sausage links at my grandpa’s house christmas day, getting to visit my mama’s childhood room- a closet of a thing, and wishing I could have known her as a girl, we would have been best friends I always imagined.

You see, what I am getting at is it is the memories.  I can vaguely remember receiving a drafting table and a stack of florescent paper to doodle on one year, and for no reason whatsoever I remember a moccasin necklace and a soft blue sweat suit another.  But truth be told I hardly remember a single other gift I have EVER received.  It isn’t that I don’t appreciate them, or that I didn’t, it’s just that well… I can’t remember them.

So, when my sweet mama told me we would be going to the glass blowing studio to learn to make ornaments this year for christmas I was so very pleased.  Time spent with some amazing women in my life, an experience, and a couple of laughs.  Yes.  Yes, please.

I am quite sure the gift of a memory, an event, a time spent together is far and away the way to go.  Something solid in the memory.  Something that lasts.  Something you truly get to keep.