Early in the day I was feeling stressed out and unhappy, and I said to myself, "You can choose joy in this situation." And LO, just saying that to myself made an immediate and palpable difference.
This is the time of year in which choosing joy is a repeated act of will. Sometimes it goes better than others. Maybe tomorrow I will tell you about the journal editor whose failure to do her job in October is causing me stress in December, but today I will tell you about the bright spots instead. Last night I was feeling especially cheerful as we lit the pink candle. It's our tradition on Gaudete Sunday to close out Evening Prayer with the old camp song Rejoice in the Lord Always, and we sang it loudly in a round. (Okay, true confession, I told my family that we were also going to do an absolutely ridiculous dance while we sang and they went along with it, because they love me.)
I made St. Lucia buns today. My little box of saffron from the Indian grocery store was not unreasonably priced, but in my mind it is still labeled as A Thing I Should Save For Special Occasions. Using it liberally in December brightens my mood reliably: I can have sunshine-colored food even if I cannot have sunshine-colored skies.
Small efforts in the cooking department bring my kids outsize happiness. Yesterday morning I sprinkled some cinnamon into a pan of hot cocoa and served it forth with a quick decade of the rosary. For dinner we made tortilla soup and flan. When I was a younger mom I worried that I was not doing enough to teach the kids about the riches of the liturgical calendar, but here at age 50 I will observe that if the Tomie de Paola picture book* about Our Lady of Guadalupe is lying on the coffee table, even big kids will want to reread it. (Huh, it looks like that one is out of print but the Kindle version is available.) And it turns out that if you quietly do geeky Catholic mom things like writing the O Antiphons on the whiteboard, at least some of your children will say "When do the O Antiphons start? You're putting them on the whiteboard again this year, right?"
I have made it to the minor prophets in my fifth annual Bible re-read. It gets easier every year, but the Old Testament remains a weird place. I have been inching forward in a German children's novel, and I am finally feeling like it's getting less effortful. (I've lost so much German vocabulary since my comparative literature major days. But some of it, at least, is coming back.) And as soon as I finish this post I am going to hop in bed and finish the Nagoski sisters' book Burnout, which has been sitting on my Kindle since its publication. It's really interesting, full of science and a surprising number of Disney princess references. I might have preferred fewer Disney princess references, but I will recommend it anyway.
Pete asked me to make another masked Santa ornament for our family's tree after I sent the original off to my friend. I finished knitting him today. He still needs me to embroider his eyes and his mask ties, and I will add a tassel to his cap. Plus intarsia always means a bajillion ends to weave in. But I think he's rather a handsome fellow, don't you? I was going to take careful notes on how I did the short-row section of the beard this time so I could post the pattern, but this is another improvised beard.
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