Holiday Gift Giving

This year, we have agreed as a Family that our Holiday Gift Giving will not focus on Money as a unit of Exchange. In other words, we will not spend a Cent. Yes, Money is tighter this year. But no, Money and Materialism are not the central defining issues of our Exchange. We want to focus on "Love" and "Creativity" instead.

At Melanie's suggestion, we sat down this Evening and brainstormed some ideas. We need to consider that we have a lot of Craft Materials at our finger tips. Some are stored in Bins in the Basement. Those Bins have hardly been touched in the busy times since we moved. Other Craft Materials are sitting on this Farm in Nature just waiting for a loving and creative use.

Ideas that we came up with included: Painting a picture, writing a Story (including Family Stories), writing a Poem, making a Quilt, creating a Wood Carving. We talked about these as a "Broad Brush Stroke", leaving out the details so that the Other would be left to guess. At least, that is what I did.

We discussed the possibility of making something small as a part of our exchange. The other part would be to jointly work on some Bookshelves for the Family Room. Yes, we will probably do this anyway. It would be nice to think of these Shelves as something we made jointly for Holiday 2009 as we settled into our Little Home. Plus, we would be able to get out our boxes of Books and put them on shelves. We have yearned for this. Our Books are treasured Friends and we have not seen many of them for a long time. Opening those Boxes would be a Gift of another sort.

Once we started brainstorming Ideas, more Ideas came along too. I also just suggested that we work as a Family at a local Soup Kitchen. Possibilities are endless. We just need to focus on the Spirit of what this Sacred Time is all about.