Christmas Countdown -Finding my Spirit

Still, in search this year to find my Christmas spirit, I came across an oldie I had all forgotten about. The short film, now 75 years old made me smile. The little girl inside me will never die. Eyes wide open, watching the same way others might watch an action movie. I can’t help it. I have grown older, I have grown up, but part of me will stay a youngster forever.

Tonight I will attack the reindeer, solely to make my husband happy, who bought the damn wonderful decoration last week without my permission. He is grounded from garage sales and estate sales, a fact he seems to ignore quite frequently.

We have lost so much when we became house-less (homeless) and he is still, even though many years later, trying to compensate for it. How different we react. I have become a minimalist who is boycotted quite frequently -and very successfully- by a hoarder in the making -if I would let him.

I often joke and call him The Leader of the Packrats, and he smiles. Life leaves scars, he has his and I have mine and we are bound together and forever by it.

Opposites attract. He keeps buying, I keep donating. One thing comes in, one goes out. Secretly he goes through the donation boxes behind my back, tries to rescue the old shirts he can’t wear anymore, and hides them in the garage, where I find them and put them back in the donation bin. He is just like my grandmother, who never could throw a thing away after she had survived World War I and II.

We heard of a family in need and The Leader of the Packrats is now on his way to the Resale Shop to find bargains for the four kids they have.

I called the lady from isupportthegirls.org asked her to come by and pick up the last bra donations. We have become friends, got to know each other. I haven’t stopped collecting since last year when I started. This time I have three large Chewy boxes full of bras and feminine hygiene products for the women in the battered-women shelter. I told my new friend about my missing Christmas spirit.

“You have the right spirit love, Christmas is about giving and you are doing it,” she said and I wondered. Perhaps I have been searching for the spirit at the wrong places?

I am getting there, I am getting there slowly.