The holidays are here. It feels so fast, like we’ve lost a year or two!

We don’t have a year or two to give, our kids are growing too fast…

I can’t help but think about Christmases past with my maternal grandparents and all of the cousins and uncles and aunts. I don’t know what our senior adults think about while reminiscing, but as a kid, I was absolutely enchanted by the coziness and perfection that my grandparents curated in their home. It has remained in my heart and given me some very high personal standards to live up to.

I remember waking up swaddled in Bay Company blankets in my Grammy’s knitting room, smelling the comforting smells of wool, fabric softener and short bread and just feeling so content and so safe. Within this cocoon, we would ski, visit the frozen waterfall, the beach, go to church, bake so many cookies, make Yorkshires, play Uno and Sorry, listen to cousins sing and play guitar by the fire, watch the light-adorned fire trucks parade down Main Street…it was truly magical.

I was a kid and obviously didn’t understand all the adult dynamics going on, which I now know existed, but all of this felt heavenly and I will treasure these memories of comfort for a lifetime. Memories I strive really hard to recreate within my family.

So much is different now. Everything is different now! Each of our parents have remarried, we have a huge blended family with so many incredible people to love. And, although I did lose a lot of the comfort I had growing up through the transition of my parents getting divorced, I am so grateful for all of the new traditions and people we are blessed to have gotten to know.

So, the one major thing blaring bright red this season is connection and how it is everything. It just is. In every way.

Today I took my daughter out for a holiday lunch and while we were sitting there, enjoying our fries and pasta, an older couple struck up a conversation after staring at us for quite a while. The point, essentially, was LOVE YOUR KIDS and use every moment you can to enjoy your life. Their children were all grown and all went to Ivy League schools (doctors and lawyers), but the mother was sad. She said it went too fast and she doesn’t have a close connection with her kids anymore, they live on opposite coasts.

We both left the lunch in tears. Her parting words were, “Babe, you will blink and it will be gone. Do everything you can to love them up now.”

When I was younger, it never occurred to me that it was all so fleeting and that things could change from one day to the next. I wish I’d understood that my grandparents would only be there for a handful of Christmases. I wish I had never taken any of it for granted. I hold fiercely to those memories and will move forward holding all of this in my heart.

We are not guaranteed any of this. This moment right here is what we have. As much as we can, we need to love, be, connect and just take it all in as if there is no tomorrow.

Merry Christmas!

XOXO