This Year's Christmas For Real

So this is a behind the scenes I'm going to be honest post. 

This holiday season is not going as planned.

Picture me, early November, all curled up on the couch dreaming of how the holiday would be after Thanksgiving:

I'd get my decorations out before Thanksgiving to have time to mull over what I wanted to use, what I didn't want to, yada, yada.

Everything would be decorated and the bins would be put away by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.

From there, every day we would make a magical recipe and would store them away to give for gifts or in anticipation of the big day.

I would tidily wrap 5 gifts a day and would be done by the week before Christmas so I didn't have to bother with last minute things.

All of this was just a big, fat wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wrong. Wrong.

And wait for it...

wrong.

So here has been the reality.  The week before Thanksgiving my grandmother passed away, which I wrote about here. She had been sick, she's in a better place, but somehow there has just been this fog.  I know you can't rush grief or getting over someone being gone but it just feels hard.  And foggy.  Some days I just want to stay home. And what should seemily have taken me no time (in my mind) and been done by now is still languishing around.

Further more from a working/website perspective this has made it so I have nothing to say. No fun Christmas tutorials over here. No house tours ready from this gal.  Unless you want "today I put on jeans and not leggings, and you can too" then yesterday I totally nailed that.

But the sad truth is that as I was wallowing.  Because that's what it's been, wallowing, I realized that maybe I'm not the only one wallowing.  And maybe that's the beauty from ashes that God pulls out of all of this and wants to use. 

This isn't our first Christmas that things haven't gone as planned.  It's not always happiness and sunshine over here folks.  There have been Christmas' where the tree fell over. Where we had no money when it certainly seemed we should. When there was no work and we had no money and it made sense we had no money.

But somehow God works through those tough times.

And I know He will work through this.

Everything will come together in His time.  I just have to give myself the grief and time.  To cry over the Christmas card I got from Grandma last year I found that sent me to grief all over again.  And the crying when I unwrapped the Christmas ornaments from her. It's all there.  All under the surface.  And I just need the time.

So I apologize to you readers.  I had a really great "Christmas countdown" series planned with games and strippers and rides and fun.  Well only one of those things was included but I digress...

Instead I am here with real life, living real, feeling real, hurting real, healing real.  And it's going to be okay. 

I hope that whatever you are going through this Christmas, your hurts, your pains, your money issues, the betrayals that you've been hurt with, the shocking news you just can't bounce back from; that that is the message of hope that I can share with you:

"It's going to be okay."

Forgive me for being absent.  Love you all.