I am very honored to be working with Hallmark as a Life is a Special Occasion featured blogger and for their sponsoring this blog post, allowing me to share personal stories, insights and inspirations in enjoying simple, every day moments, with you (yes, YOU!)
Hey you...yeah, YOU!...Thanksgiving is only eight days away -- seven, if you're sitting here and blogging (like me!) when I should be scrubbing tiles, herding killer dust bunnies, hiding the laundry and preparing for a houseful of company.
Then again, it's not like my mother-in-law is going to check under the beds or my father-in-law comes over to hunt dust bunnies or anything -- although, it is sort of difficult to NOT notice all the dust when it rolls up and greets you at the front door.
Unless our sock-eating, bone-headed chocolate lab (a.k.a. Doofus-Dawg) beats them to it, then jumps on my mother and probably breaks her new arm -- on the other hand, where can I put a 90 pound dog...I'm sort of running out of hiding places with ALL this laundry...and what the heck IS that smell...anyway?!?
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore having family over for the holidays. It's just that, as the kids get older (me, too), I find myself worrying less about stuff like:
- The table setting -- nope, it does NOT match.
- The food preparation -- yes, some of it comes out of a can.
- The house -- dust bunnies are like pets, really. I've even named a few of the less rabid ones.
The truth of the matter is, no matter how my husband, Garth (not his real name) and I try, we've come to accept the simple fact that some things just don't go right -- before you can say "Pass the potatoes," someone's puking all over your nice, clean and mostly shiny floors.
Because, in our house, it isn't the holidays unless someone in the family is sick or scheduled for a surgical procedure.
Then, last month, Hurricane Sandy hit (a.k.a. #Frankenstorm, or #Frigginstorm if you're from Jersey) and literally gave us a whole new perspective on stuff, like:
- Helping our next neighbors pull a tree off of their roof
- Watching fire trucks put out the house that caught fire down the corner where my kids catch the school bus
- Finally venturing out to try and find a gas station with working gas pumps (or gas) and getting a bird's eye view of the devastation, just outside our own backyard
My husband and I can't help but still feel as if we had dodged the perverbial bullet.
We're still trying to get back to [the new] normal here on the Jersey coast and, well, concerns over mis-matched table settings and tacky floors have now become insignificant, even insensitive, in the face of a natural disaster.
For me, the true meaning of the holidaze is and always has been a very simple one: each and every moment we spend together with those we love -- no matter how difficult, unplanned, or imperfect it may be -- is truly a gift, my friends.
You know, now that I think on it some more, celebrating Christmas in July may not be such a bad idea after all...at our house, anyways...right?!?
How about you? Have you experienced some "perfectly imperfect" moments preparing for the holidaze?
In the meantime, bring on the Christmas specials and have a wonderful Thanksgiving (or a reasonable facsimile, thereof) my friends!
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