Holiday Productivity
It’s amazing how quickly the bones of the home chill once the days shorten and the sun stops blazing. It’s amazing how wonderful warm mugs and hot meals feel once we’re not sweating. It’s amazing how cozy a lamp is, or how a quilt feels in the morning when the sun is slow to rise and life becomes more internal. But just as we think that life might slow down a bit, the holidays rush in loud and busy, twinkling and bustling.
As the keepers, tenders, makers of home, we must keep our perspective correct and appropriate during this season. I’m going to say this to myself and you:
The Holidays ARE productive!
The holidays aren’t interruptions of life but part of life. They aren’t a waste. They are a blessing.
I’m the kind of person who finds all the extra holiday things overwhelming. My ideal holiday would be nothing extra except the family celebration on the day of, the decorating, and the feast preparation. No parties, no extra events. Just the decorating, food prep, and actual feasting with the family. My ideals and other people’s ideals are two different things, and that is a good thing! Thank the Lord for filling the world with diversity instead of hollow, empty uniformity.
Depending on your idea of the ideal holiday, how do we look at full calendars and extra food, and extra, extra, everything?
We remind ourselves and each other that this is our work and all that we are doing during the holidays is the productive value of the home!
Side Note: Sundays are the same. It is a product of our management to have our families in church ready to hear the word preached. It is productive to rest, and to do works of mercy and necessity. These are productive things.
Holiday madness is ours to manage. We decide what can and can’t be attended, to go all in, or simplify. It is on us to skillfully and knowledgeably manage the holiday so that the time is used right and well. This is our job and if we do it, the holiday season will be productive.
What do we have to do? There is no list of what holiday productivity is. It is a question for each household to explore and settle on. We should ask our husbands, children, and ourselves what are the most important things to us. We should observe reactions, complaints, and praise. Is it decorating, feasting, gifts, crafts, cards, pictures, extended family, trips, snow, music, etc.? What we decide here will help us sort through what to do and what not to do.
Knowing our limits is vital. We need to know our strengths and weaknesses, the dietary restrictions of our people, our budgets, and our social limitations. Nothing is worse than making everyone miserable because we the keepers demand it all. Pick a few things and enjoy them. Don’t make life frantic trying to do it all. And don’t measure your holiday cheer by others.
Productivity is better measured by the love of our traditions not the number of them. It is measured by the delight and wonder of our people not the number of parties we rush to. It’s measured by the joy and enjoyment of food, not by how much food. It is measured by our hearts not our stuff.
We can find calm and a love of the holidays if we will get our thinking screwed on right first, if we will see the change up for the next 6-8 weeks as a change in our type of productivity, not the lessening of our productivity.
It is wise to remember that God created holidays, that they’re gifts to enjoy, that they’re there to remind us of spiritual truth and give us deeper family bonds and deeper cultural bonds. This is what holidays produce: bonds. If we manage them well, they will unite our families together for generations, and give them rich cultural heritages. If we mismanage them, they will damage our family’s unity and add to our lack of cultural heritage. We must take our work and our role in this seriously.
It’s good to remember that we women have been managing the magic of holidays for generations, since creation. We are doing the real feminine work of tying people together through feasting, merry-making, and tradition. We are linked mother to daughter, aunt to niece, grandmother to granddaughter in pouring love, joy, and warmth into these special days. Yes, they’re busy, but this busyness is productive when we know why we’re doing it and what all the busyness produces.
Sometimes it helps to look at what isn’t productive. Anxiety, franticness, and stressing our families and ourselves out is not productive. When our to-do lists seem longer than normal, and our heads are spinning with plans, we must have a sharp talk with ourselves: We do the HARD things. This hard thing may be acknowledging our limitations and saying no to a party, craft, or baking project. (Saying no is saying no to things outside the home AND inside the home.) Sometimes the hard thing can be cutting back on gift-giving. Sometimes it is picking up store-bought goodies instead of making handmade ones.
The messy part about doing the hard thing is deciding if we need to embrace the hard or cut some things out. That’s when we go back to what is important to our family and what our family can handle.
Productivity is producing abundance and satisfying wants. We must identify those wants in our home. The holidays are a wonderful time to lavish love on our people, to change things up in our homes, and to bring wonder and delight inside. It can be a magical time of creating traditions that survive generations. It is a way of holding back the dark and pushing out the cold of winter with light and laughter. It is a time for carols and hymns. It is a wonderful opportunity to teach thankfulness and share the gospel with your children.
Don’t bah-humbug the season just because some mistreat it. Embrace the myths, stories, traditions, extra family time, extra crafts, and cooking. We can utilize this time in our homes to tie our families together with stronger cords. This is productive.
Dear sweet HearthKeeper, we get to embrace the holidays in all their glory because we are the homemakers. We get to take this gift and use it to produce abundance in our homes if only we will stop seeing them as an intrusion, as law instead of grace. We should strive to see them as a blessing and a tool to do our work differently. Let’s look at what we do and what we want to do and make wise decisions that let us see parties, presents, and decorating as productivity pouring from our hearts, hearths, and homes.
