trying to figure this out!

December 26, 2024… how in the world did I get here?

This time last year I decided to take one day at a time, very slowly… starting with January 2, normally a big let-down day, end of the holiday season, time to get on with the mundane chores of the ordinary day. And I thought I was doing just that …

But suddenly I looked up and my house was fully decorated for Christmas!

What happened to all the days between January 2, 2024 and December 26th?

When I was a little girl, it seemed like the years were so long and my Christmas Day birthday was never going to arrive. I think the longest year was the one when I turned nine, I wanted to be ten so badly! I wanted to do the birthday march at church and drop one thin dime into the offering plate and turn on my heel to smugly return to my seat (not that far of a walk since my designated place was always on the front pew) feeling like a woman. Never mind that my wish list that year was to get a “Bride doll” and a diary that had a “lock and a key”… always requested for exactly that way.

A lot of Christmas days have come and gone since that one, good times, sad times, Christmas programs, traveling to California or South Georgia, and the first year that I had started work at the John Deere Tractor Company and had the money to buy the most beautiful aluminum Christmas tree with a color wheel that spun slowly changing the sparkling branches from gold to red, blue to green and yellow… we sat for hours just watching that tree change colors. I had the money to buy Christmas gifts for my brother and a Barbie doll for my little sister. I was the happiest girl ever… then there was the Christmas that I felt adult love and felt adult loss of the same… it was that very New Year’s Day that I fell across my bed, I was crying and praying when suddenly I was speaking in an unknown language! I stopped because I was so surprised! When I started praying again it happened again, again I stopped and then I realized it was the gift of the Holy Spirit that I had so longed to have and it seemed I was never going to know the joy that I had seen in others for my whole life. What a wonderful way to start the new year! I couldn’t wait to tell everyone what had happened!

So here I sit, December 26th, 2024… driver’s license renewed for another eight years, which just went by so quickly, with this new computer, trying to learn how to use a PC after twenty years of using a Mac, by the light of the Christmas tree, now stripped of all the toys that were under it, thinking of how fast the past ten years have passed since mother quietly closed her eyes to go be with daddy and all her relatives gone on before her, Christmas Day 2014, and vowing that the coming year will not go so fast, I will enjoy every day and …

I hope you had a very Merry Christmas and that you will have a blessed New Year in 2025…unbelievable!!!