Thankful

 Expressing my love for the Thanksgiving/Christmas Season 

 

First of all, I know it has been a really long time since my last post. It’s insane to me that the last time I hit the little orange “publish” button for this blog, the most viewed post had only a little over a hundred pageviews. When I think back on that crazy week of my summer, I am still overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and recognition I received for my letter to Detroit.

That said, I’m back! Junior year swept me off my feet with all the work and extracurricular that appeared from the very first day of school onward. Now, as the first semester begins to wind down and my teachers are panicking and talking about exams, I am finding myself very reflective, and with Thanksgiving approaching fast, I have so much to be thankful for.

In October of 2014, an electrical fire broke out at my house. I never knew how devastating something like that could be. I like to think myself a spiritually grounded person, and I think most of the time,  I am. But as a sixteen-year-old girl growing up in lower middle-class, 21^st-century America, I can be pretty materialistic. Losing nearly all of my clothes and most of my possessions while trying to navigate my sophomore year of high school was not easy. Life at home became increasingly difficult, because tensions ran really high. Moving is stressful when you are prepared for it. Imagine having to pack up a house that is smoke-damaged, waterlogged, and half ruined, all in a weekend. Having to sort through and clean everything, on top of buying new things and handling the many generous donations we got, on top of moving into a too-small-for-us home…well, overwhelming is an understatement.

That was just over a year ago now, and earlier this month, we finally got to go home. I am so joyful to be back in our house. The house that I call home may not look like much, but it was my safe haven when I needed that more than anything else in my life. It represents a stability that I am so grateful to have. There are still boxes everywhere, and we aren’t nearly as organized as we would like to be, but we’re getting there. The house is starting to feel like ours, more than it did even before the fire. I think an experience like that is such a teachable moment. Being back home, I take so much more ownership and pride than I did before. I can’t take it for granted anymore, because I know what it’s like not to have that. I never appreciated our 1,200 square feet more than I do now.

The holidays have always held such significance for me. I am one of those people who absolutely adores Christmas. It arrives 23 days after my birthday each year, so the month of December is always a joyful time for me. When I was younger, we would spend Thanksgiving with my Maw-Maw, and holidays without her are always hard. But as I prepare for Thanksgiving this week, which we are spending in our home, I am beyond grateful. I love holiday preparation; the food, the decorations, the music. Thanksgiving afternoon was always spent decorating my Maw-Maw’s Christmas tree, and I love that tradition. It’s things like that, in my opinion, that make the holiday season so special. There’s endless nostalgia surrounding Christmastime, and I relish those sorts of things.

So this week, we are working through the boxes to make shopping lists, and organizing cabinets to house groceries. We’re making room for Christmas decoration, solely for the tradition of it (my family and I aren’t even staying in town for Christmas this year), and I’m setting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to record on the DVR because for my dad to miss the football game would be treason in the Mattheis house, and we can’t have that. On Thursday, I will be making a pie from a recipe that I have never needed to write down, because my Maw-Maw taught it to me when I was so little that I had to sit on the counter. This coming weekend, I will get to hang all my ornaments on the tree, and hang my stocking, and put the jingle bell collars on my dogs. We’ll put out red candles and change the scent in our wax warmer to something more Christmas-y. Soon, I’ll get to start wrapping Christmas presents, and we’ll make Christmas treats and I’ll wear my candy-cane earrings.

All of that is happening, and this week, I am so much more thankful for what I have than I can recall ever being. I am truly blessed, despite my struggles, and because of them. So I take this opportunity to wish you and yours a very happy and blessed Thanksgiving.