STUFFED

I have just been writing about how I doubt very much whether anyone’s happiness is contingent on how many possessions they have.

If you are like me you got more ‘stuff’ for Christmas. My favourite is my little nephews Christmas box which I unwrapped to find his latest drawing. What perfect timing; my refrigerator doors needed a new piece of art and my 9 year old buddy provided it just in time.

As usual, I need to see if Godiva Chocolates are a publicly listed company since I bought 3 gigantic boxes of 103 chocolates each. They were received with elation and great happiness by the chocoholics among us. In return I got a more manageable size from my niece and nephew along with other loot and goodies.

I look around and can hardly wait to tear my overcrowded shelves apart and start to purge this place of the magazines and brochures and flyers and stuff that weighs both the shelves AND me down. There is so much of it that I am dismayed that I can’t pile it up today and begin.

However, although I feel like it might be the only way to begin the New Year as a fresh start, I have to wait until the Christmas/New Year/Christmas/New Year season is finally over on January 14th, our New Year.

Although I am looking forward to the event, on the 10th of January I am hosting a combination Ukrainian Christmas meal and 16th Birthday party for my niece/goddaughter. For a change it is not on traditionally meatless Christmas Eve (December 24th and again January 6th) and I can serve meat and a variety of food.

The clutter really can’t be dealt with until the ravenous hordes (my family) depart. 

The timing gets crazy because by the 6th and Christmas Day, the 7th of January each year, most of us have just begun to recover from all the food over Christmas and New Years. Luckily we don’t add much alcohol since most have a drive and our laws on DIU are justifiably severe, so not many hangovers are expected.

In general I suppose it is nice that I have all these things. Like anyone else with a lot of stuff though, I am very aware that 5 minutes, no even one minute with my lovely husband would be worth the whole lot and so much more than all of the junk in the world.

Cancer in remission and love and loss long ago taught me what was most important in life.

May we all learn it more easily than some of us had to in order to get our priorities straight.

In the meantime, consider one of your New Year’s resolutions to purge or recycle or regift some of the stuff you have accumulated to the kind of ‘good home’ I am looking for when I FINALLY get to my purge mid January.