Creating memories
Time flies! One month it’s turkey for Thanksgiving, quickly followed by ghouls and goblins trick-or-treating. Next, Christmas carols are streaming everywhere. Once the Christmas festivities are done, we’ll be toasting in another year. A hive of activity that gives us an adrenaline rush towards the end of the year.
This year I’m taking a pause in the midst of the madness, and I hope you’ll join me.
What memories and gifts do I cherish the most? Those that have stayed with me throughout the years? Or the fleeting ones that seem big at the time, but I can’t remember a year later? As I grow older, I prefer loving, thoughtful, meaningful experiences over material gifts.
Now that I’m thinking about it, the memories I treasure most are not material. I think of my grandparents, all four of them. Their gifts were not wrapped in paper and ribbon. They weren’t placed under a Christmas tree. My grandparents gave us the gift of their time, spent with us doing seemingly unimportant things like baking, sewing, identifying countries and capitals on maps, naming models of cars and airplanes, visiting the USIS to watch space shuttle take-offs and presidential debates. And best of all – reading with us! From my youngest days - bedtime stories and Ladybird books with Peter and Jane, New Oxford English Readers (NOEC), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. In my tween years, Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, Franklin Dixon’s Hardy Boys. In my teen years, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, TIME, Newsweek, National Geographic and Readers Digest.
I cherish memories created by my parents: organizing family picnics and beach birthdays, trips to the Drive-In Theatre when we were young. And midnight mass together.
I think of our young children gifting us “coupons”: “nice” things like washing the car, doing the dishes, vacuuming the house, making simple breakfasts.
Even today, our now-grown boys and their partners often give us gifts of their time – board games birthdays, karaoke-with-live-family-band nights, family sports days in the summer, Easter/Christmas mass. These memories I will carry with me through my life, much more than any gift in a box. They’ve helped me become who I am. The way my grandparents, parents and children made me feel inspires me to try and make others feel special too.
My gifts this year will be time spent with and for others. They may or may not be placed under the tree (depends how imaginative I feel!), but they will be precious.
As the year ends, I hope you have lovely memories to cherish forever. I wish all my readers a wonderful Christmas filled with love, peace and joy.
And let’s not forget what Christmas is about! Thank you for reading!
Email me: bernadette@gogettercoaching.com .