Bah Humbug = The Blues

Maybe this song deserved a trigger alert?  The Emotions can rip your heart out of your chest and Alicia Keys wasn't too bad in that video either.

Despite my general chubbiness and fat, dimpled cheeks I am not actually inclined to jolliness-especially during the holiday season.

There are any number of reasons why.*  The main one is that as we have gotten older, my family and I have drifted farther and farther apart.  I remember as a child being excited and annoyed by the holidays.  Thanksgiving and Christmas meant visiting, which was fun, and having to share beds or sleep on the floor, which was not.  There would be family everywhere and plenty of people to play with.  We had a Christmas tree and Christmas decorations.  On Christmas day there would usually be at least one new toy for each kid but what I remember most, what I miss most, is the gathering together.

All of our holiday traditions were built around that homecoming.  My mother's family would gather at her sister's house in Montrose.  My father's family would descend on my grandmother's house in Blackwell.  I go to any one of those places on any major holiday and I could expect an overcrowded, overheated house with no place to sit, no privacy, and an eternal waiting list for the bathroom.

Things change.

People grew older and less able to do the holiday work.  Sons and daughters chipped in but then they moved farther away for work.  The road home became too long.  They stopped coming.  Brothers and sisters grew up and the life of the family wasn't enough to contain them.  Children left home and each year it became more and more difficult to haul the tree out of the box, to put up the decorations, to go through the motions.  The holiday shuffle ground to a halt.

I understood it, but I wasn't ready.  I decided to be bitter about Christmas in general instead of sad.

I was a teenager when I had to let go of those traditions.  Now I am an adult, one of the ones who moved too far from home to make the trip back.  Now I have my husband's family to consider, and a visitation arrangement that last year meant we spent six hours of Christmas day on the interstate.

This year, despite everything, I am going to try to do things differently.

*Not least of which is the expectation of jolliness.  Why force a person to pretend goodness and joy?  That's brutal.

Timing Out

There have been a lot of changes around the old new Ponderosa lately.  We moved, I started summer school . . .  and Wes got a part time job! These things are all pretty awesome.

The not so awesome?

Wes starts his job next week and I also still work part time--across town.  I've been making it to work on time but barely . . . and this is only because Wes picks me up outside of my classroom building and whisks me away to my gig.  We won't be able to maintain that though.  Why?

We have been a one car family for nearly a year now.

I thought it would be a pain in the ass not having a car of my own.  Instead, I've found it incredibly liberating.  No car, no insurance, no gas . . . money that can be spent on other things.  We only needed one since Wes was in class full time and I was the only one working.  Things will be different now.  We will both be working similar hours and I don't know how possible it would be for me to make it to work on time throughout most of the week.

Additionally, there hasn't been much time to finish homework or finish unpacking . . . and nothing left over to work on the wedding.  Since I work most evenings in a week, it's pretty much go, go, go on classwork from 6 a.m. on. 

I just don't know how to make this work or even if eight dollars an hour is even worth this much angst.

Daybreak

Well . . . not quite.

Wes and I have decided on a morning wedding.  We are setting the ceremony time at 9:00 in the morning.

We have two very good reasons. 

First, we want to have an outdoor ceremony . . . in Georgia . . . in September.  It's probably going to be hot and steamy and not necessarily in a good way. 

We also are not having the traditional party all night long wedding reception.  Instead, we're aiming for relaxing picnic.  The goal is to have the ceremony in the morning, serve a nice brunch with a little side of wedding cake and enjoy our day at the park.

We might plan a little night time outing as well but the plan is just a really low key, beautiful celebration.

Deciding on a morning wedding might seem a small decision, but it wasn't one that we came to easily.  Our wedding vision is constantly evolving and I have finally decided that this is a good thing.  

When we first start thinking about weddings, we think of all the really cool/beautiful/awesome things we've seen/heard/read about and we want our wedding to be just like that.

This is good because it's inspiration.

Seeing beautiful, ingenious ideas fires up the imagination and motivates us to push forward because wow-look how awesome it could be! 

This is bad because it can feel like pressure.

How do you make beautiful detail x happen if you don't have the funds/space/time/skill?  If you dwell on these questions too long you begin to feel like failure and like your wedding won't measure up.  This can lead to inaction which is very, very bad.

While having a plan and sticking to it works just fine for some people, others need to just commit to staying flexible.

I wasn't willing to do that and for a long time I clung to my original wedding vision which was proving to be incredibly difficult to achieve on our own.

I cried about it a little--but I eventually embraced flexibility and the license to just do whatever we wanted to do.

Deciding on a morning wedding removed a lot of the guilt and competitiveness I was feeling.  It meant that we were not planning a dinner and dance party so it really freed me to feel that we can do whatever we want. 

And that whatever we want will be just fine.