Thursday with Santas

Happy Thursday! All my concentration is gone and I only have room in my brain for wrapping, recipes, decorating, hanging out with my family, and the ending of Advent. Last night I went through the non-tree decorations–the ones that should’ve gone up before the tree–and put up about half. Not because I’m feeling minimalist, but because it feels like just enough.

Do you ever get pictures stuck in your head about how things should be? In the past I’ve felt like if I had to put EVERYTHING out, as though I would hurt the feelings of the decorations left behind. Or my kids would be disappointed. Or because I simply had the picture in my head I had to color in completely. I remember teachers reminding me to color inside the lines but to color so there were no white spaces left. But it’s in the spaces where we breathe. It’s in the spaces where our imagination can stretch and grow. I know that’s how I feel about writing. I want to leave space for the reader to imagine and make the story their own.

I call this photo Santa Mantel. We have no fireplace so a bookcase will have to do. (We are always more likely to have the latter rather than the former.) I collected all our little Santas together. But I was also playing with my Brushstroke app. So you get a picture of how I feel about having all these silly Santas I’ve collected over the years rather than their physical appearance.

The Santa riding on the cart being pulled by three reindeer is my latest, yet oldest addition. It was my grandmother’s. My mother recently passed it on to me. My grandparents also had a silver tinsel tabletop Christmas tree with blue ornaments that they put up for decades–because they were that cool.

2 thoughts on “Thursday with Santas”

  1. Priscilla says:

    Brushstroke app, is that what you can do with it? That’s cool!

    The one post-Thanksgiving weekend when we had the flu and tried to put up decorations, and failed, was the weekend I learned so much about our family’s Christmas ideal. No one missed the other half of the stuff we were too exhausted to drag out. Nowadays we have only our most favoritest ornaments (including the Doctor Who weeping angel) on a smaller tree. It’s perfect for us.

    1. Laura Benedict says:

      What a lovely story, Priscilla. Such a challenging Advent. Isn’t it interesting how people’s attitudes and feelings are revealed in extraordinary circumstances?!

      Brushstroke is a lot of fun. I can spend hours on one image.

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