My daughter just came by with a stack of presents for her children, hiding them in my office closet. We will wrap them together Monday afternoon.
I’ve ordered the plum pudding for the plum pudding trifle we have every Christmas. Too yummy for words and so easy. I’ve posted the recipe at the bottom of this message. Did you know that this plum pudding has thirteen core ingredients (representing Jesus Christ and the 12 Disciples).
My granddaughter, Sabine, almost 3, decorated my little tree and I’ve already read her The Nutcracker at least five times.
Yesterday, I took my grandson, Edon, who’s in first grade at the Emerson Waldorf School, to see the school faculty perform the traditional Oberufer play, The Shepherd’s Play.
I have several Pandora stations and Amazon Prime Music playlists with Christmas Music so familiar carols fill my apartment as I work. How many times can I hear Greensleeves and love it? How many variations are there of this carol?
Christmas always feels the same: Cherishing relationships. Indulging in riches of decorations, food, music. The retelling of the Story of the Nativity. I love all of it because it is all so familiar, nothing really changes outwardly.
But Christmas is the beginning of the Holy Nights and every year the Holy Nights' experience changes and I change because I work with the questions
and imaginations of the Twelve Nights.
But the Holy Nights Change Me!
Through the changing questions and imaginations living in the Holy Nights, I change.
My soul changes and my body changes. And I also realize my experience and feeling of my humanity and my individuality changes. All in good ways.
What are the good ways I change?
- My soul becomes more innocent. I practice wondering
at myself. I am looking through a lens that is ground by the angels. So each year I find my capacity to know truth, feel beauty and do good seems to shine more brightly…fewer scratches, less cloudiness.
- My body seems more mine and much more harmonious. My soul and my body feel more intimately necessary to each other. Incarnation and embodiment feel more
real.
- I become more and more aware of the bond I have with every other human being (regardless of who they voted for or if they left their homeland or tried to blow it up or they cut in front of my car and made me slam on my brakes.). So I stop judging others for how different they are from me or how they behave or think or vote. We are the Family of Humanity. I learn to love more.
- And I become
more aware of how I am Lynn and there has never been another Lynn and never will be. And no one will ever know all of me no matter how much they love me. I will never know all of me. I learn to embrace my solitude and the vast, unknowable complexity of my individuality and I find more freedom to be me.
And each year I feel a little more awake to my spiritual core, the gifts
of divine beings, and the mysteries beyond the perceptions of my senses.
Do the Holy Nights change you?
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