I love this time of year.\u00a0 I love the twinkling, multi-color lights, the way the lights reflect off the ornaments on the tree.\u00a0 I love the smell of fresh baked cookies, the taste of cookie dough.\u00a0 I love the smell of my Balsam & Pine candle (it’s from Yankee Candle).\u00a0 I love curling up with a mug of hot chocolate in front of the fire place.\u00a0 I love the music.\u00a0 I love the memories and nostalgia.\u00a0 I love making new memories, and creating new traditions with my own family.\u00a0 I love this time year.<\/p>\n
I hate this time of year.\u00a0 I hate the depression that always comes.\u00a0 I hate the “gimmies” and the “I wants” that come no matter how much we try to stave them off.\u00a0 I hate the commercialism, the Christmas stuff in the stores well before Halloween. I hate the stress that comes with all the projects and the “did I get a gift for that one?\u00a0 Did we forget anyone?”\u00a0 I hate the self-imposed pressure to be happy and make life all kittens and sunshine for my kids when I just want to curl up in a fetal postition and sleep through from November til February.\u00a0 Hibernation – It’s not just for bears anymore!\u00a0 I just want to avoid it all.\u00a0 I hate this time of year.<\/p>\n
But I love this time.<\/p>\n
Christmas music makes me cry in such an odd mix of joy and sorrow, that I’m not sure what to do with all the emotion bottled up inside.\u00a0 Certain CD’s especially remind me of my Dad.\u00a0 John Denver and the Muppets “A Christmas Together” is one of them.\u00a0 Good memories of listening to the record (yes, vinyl. I feel so old!) throughout the holiday season and yelling “Ba Dum Dum Dum Dum!” with Piggy.\u00a0 It was always one of our favorites.<\/p>\n
[youtube http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=I1szT-GOvug]<\/p>\n
This year, I’m struggling.\u00a0 This year marks 10 years since we lost our Angel<\/a>.\u00a0 While time has healed the wounds and lessened the pain, the scars are still there.\u00a0 This year will be the second year that my GeekBoy doesn’t have a joint birthday party with his Grampa<\/a>.\u00a0 I miss my dad.\u00a0 He loved this time year.<\/p>\n I wish I had his joy in the season.\u00a0 I wish I could be free of the sorrow and depression that drags me down.\u00a0 I try.\u00a0 I am not entirely sure how successful I am.\u00a0 But as long as the kids have a good time, and good memories of their own to look back on…\u00a0 I’ll have done my job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love this time of year.\u00a0 I love the twinkling, multi-color lights, the way the lights reflect off the ornaments on the tree.\u00a0 I love the smell of fresh baked …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,6,15,26,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-angels","category-family_life","category-missing-dad","category-music","category-videos"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yuriar.com\/katp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}