I think I bit off more than I could chew....
I started a Christmas tradition for myself several years ago when we still lived in Arvada to display all my beautiful Nativity sets and invite friends and neighbors to celebrate Christ's birth with me in that manner.
That worked pretty well for a while. Because it was a lot of work, I began hosting the open house every other year. Also, I didn't want it to become just a ho-hum thing that people weren't interested in coming to any more.
In 2019 when the bi-annual festival open house was supposed to be scheculed, my daughter and two teen-aged sons were living with us while their new home was being built. There wasn't room to put up the display that year, so I planned for 2020. Well, we all know what happened to that year--COVID pandemic. Everyone was confined to home and not going out to socialize.
Fast forward to this year--2021. I vacillated. Should I go ahead and spend all that time putting up the displays? Would people come? Could I do it all by myself?
My children and families all came for Thanksgiving. The house was full. No way to begin the monumental task of removing everything from all the shelves, boxing it up, and preparing space for Christmas details. I was all set to begin the 29th of November and did a few things for a couple of days. Then pow! I found myself flat on my back in bed. Not Covid. Not bronchitis. Not pneumonia. All the illnesses the doctor tested me for. But I was right down in bed. It took until December 7th before I was able to begin in earnest. Even then, as I was going through boxes, I kept thinking "Should I go ahead and do this?" Especially when all those stacks of boxes were open and the place--both the basement and the upstairs--was a proper MESS!
I knew there was no way I could do it all myself. In 2017 I had the sister missionaries come and decorate the two trees. A monumental task in itself! But we have Elders serving in our area now. No way they would want to do that, though they did come and carry some of the big boxes upstairs for me. The only alternative left was to hire someone. Emma Jex ,13 years old and great at following directions, came for two hours six days in a row and did that big job for me--and also set up the "kids' room" where the little people are allowed to touch all they want. Even then, it was still many, many days that went from eight hours to twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours. Most mornings I began early and worked late. My routine was just crawl out of bed, brush my teeth and pull on my clothes to get started. Three-thirty am to get up, 1 am to go to bed. Whew! And not one day that I went on my walk or even did my exercises. (I'll be paying for THAT down the road for sure.)
I even managed to prepare flyers to take to the neighbors, Louis'work, the RS Facebook page--but not in the wide distribution like I did in other years.
Finally, the minute arrived to throw open the doors and invite our friends and neighbors in. The house looked great. Suddenly all that mess had turned into the miracle of that "One, Wonderful Night" so long ago. And it was all worth the time, energy, and crippled back and fingers that resulted from the tedious labor of the previous 12 days.
Who says there is no such thing as MAGIC?
Merry Christmas
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