Ode To Joy

If you haven't seen this yet, you really should: more orchestra flash mobs, please.  My favorite is the little girl conducting from the lamp post.  Adorable.

The weather has begun to turn.  You can feel it in the persistent chill that pervades the morning air, even on the warmer days.

Winter is coming.

This weekend will be our wholesale house tidying and Christmas decorating extravaganza, where most of the downstairs will be transformed into a decorated wonderland that makes all of us smile every year, even as we are dragging things up and down the stairs from storage to the living areas and back again.

Am trying to figure out a way to decorate this year without going whole hog, because I honestly don't have the energy to do the whole thing this year.  The question is, how much is enough to visually satisfy what the heart wants without overdoing it to the point of exhaustion?  It's a concept that gives me difficulty, but I am going to work on my forced zen and try to err on the side of not too much.

It is a marathon, not a sprint, right?

I am reminding myself of that, at least, and hoping I take it to heart.  Call it a personal work in progress.


We have family coming in for Thanksgiving next week.  I love this time of year, and getting to spend it with family and friends makes it all the more magical.  But, for my money, just getting to see the joy in The Peanut's face as we decorate the tree this weekend will be worth the price of admission all by itself.

Today, the sun room will get tackled, furniture moved around a bit, and various and sundry bits carted off to other spots in the house to make way for the tree.  If I am really lucky, we'll have it up and ready to be decorated by tomorrow, and we can then take our time on everything else as we can get it done.

It used to be that I could do the entire house, start to finish, in a single day of concentrated effort.  Not this year.  But I am actually grateful for the fact that I'm consciously not going to push myself past my sane limits -- I've decided to think of it as progress, even if it is sort of forced on my from things outside my immediate control.

Just being able to do any of this brings me enormous joy.

There was a point, just after the third chemo treatment last summer, where I wondered if I would survive to this point in the year.  Yet here I am.

Saw this YouTube of a flashmob orchestra concert of Beethoven's beautiful Ode to Joy.  Love that piece, and the way that this performance unfolded just made me smile.

If I have learned nothing these last few months, it is that gratitude truly is everything.  So amid all the bustling craziness of the holiday season, the turkey basting and pie making and grocery shopping madness that is Thanksgiving, pause for a moment and really and truly give thanks for a few things.  Your heart will be happier for it.

Find some joy for yourself today.  And then pass it on...