Do you ever have those times when you have so many different thoughts going through your head that you can’t even decide which thought to focus on? Yea, me too. And it’s been happening for about a week, I think, as we’ve drawn closer to these days that so many hold sacred, good and bad, for all kinds of reasons, also good and bad.

I am what you call a day dreamer and a night thinker… with north pole sparkles in my veins. I simply love this time of year, and sometimes that makes things very weird inside.

This year is so very different in many ways as you might expect, but then there are a few things that have brought mixed emotion tears to my eyes this week because they haven’t changed at all. My circle has changed significantly, but there are still people I want in it with every fiber of my being. My address is new, but I look around and it’s familiar. My job has tweaked a bit through the year, but I’m now back where I was.

It’s not uncommon for me to think of home… and of all of the different ways I’ve considered home. Some I would love to return to. Some have been redefined. But the home I’ve come to be most fond of is the home where emotional safety resides. There are people I hold very near and dear because of the home they’ve shown me – even when it seems to have been foreclosed on. For a long time, I didn’t know if I really believed in that kind of home. But those mixed emotion tears remind me that now I know it does, and that I’m enough for me if that isn’t present… because I deserve my ideal.

I also think of warmth often, and what it really means. Anyone that has seen me in my comfy moments knows that I love a good blanket… I mean you could nearly call me Linus. But it’s more than that. It’s brainstorming with my daughter a gift idea for her school teacher. It’s asking my youngest what he wants to get for someone and hearing him so sure about an answer. It’s watching them run in the snow at twilight while snow is falling around us, kissing the snowman and angels we’d just created. It’s sitting across the Waffle House table from them just today and soaking in their giggles. It’s the thank you’s from someone who really means it after a moment of help, knowing that someone else could have but that same someone else might not have. It’s the way my silly pup snuggles up next to me as if we’ve only ever gotten along. I love being warm.

I also think a lot about hugs… hugs of the mind in a note of encouragement, hugs of the heart in a “drive safe” or “get home soon” message, and hugs of the heart that melt away the stresses of the world. These usually come for me coupled with a physical hug. It can be from someone as young as my kids to an older woman I just helped grab oranges for when to her I can tell it was never about the oranges… I believe there are people in this life that when you hug them, every single stress in this world melts because the earth stops. Those hugs… man, do I love those hugs. It’s not uncommon for me to sit this time of year with my eyes closed but be smiling because I’m thinking back on those moments where all of life’s strings were gathered back together by someone’s arms, big or small, were wrapped around me.

There are so many other things I could write about regarding the magic of the holidays as it pertains to me. But these things, these few things, they are some of the things that have captured significant amounts of my day-dreaming and night-thinking time this holiday season.

I do hope that you have a truly beautiful holiday and that you haven’t exerted too much energy trying to make sense of my ramblings. Those in your home deserve your energy more. At the very least, take some time and remember the magic of it all.