winter

Outdoors in the Winter? YES!

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Unless we ski, snowshoe, or take winter hikes, we tend to hibernate through the season. We rush from our house to our car to work and back again bundled up, heat on high. We layer up and avoid the outside as best we can. However our feelings about the cold and snow, the outdoors are actually very healthy for us, even those of us who are not particularly outdoorsy.

With our windows closed keeping us sealed in and cooped up, we’re more susceptible to colds and lingering infections and just feeling yicky and not ourselves. One way to combat that stale air and the winter doldrums is to get outside every day. We don’t often think of that as a solution, but the fresh air is a real pick me up.

I know. It goes against every fiber of my being too. The cold. The snow. The wind. But fifteen minutes every day has a way of rejuvenating our systems.

For kids, it gets their energy focused in the snow instead of on your living room sofa.

Bring out the shovels and the Nerf guns.

By the time winter recess comes along, at least in the northeast, we’re about ready for a mid-winter thaw. The air is a little warmer – forties instead of twenties, the sun is bright.

Take a walk.

Have a snowball fight.

Run and jump.

Make snow angels.

And then when you come inside, have a steaming cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows.

It takes just a little time, a little effort, and no money. Not to mention that it will help to keep the family healthy and ready to go back to school at the end of recess.

Candlemas

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If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,
Winter will have another fight;
But if Candlemas Day be clouds and rain,
Winter is gone, and will not come again.
~Old Rhyme

Around New Year’s when my husband wants to take down the tree, I say no, and try to put it off until Twelfth Night.

When Twelfth Night rolls around, and the following weekend arrives, he tries again, but I come up with but we didn’t put the tree up until late, let’s leave it another week.

And then why don’t we just leave it until Martin Luther King Day. Isn’t that what we always do? (We do, but I can’t remember why.)

This year, we got the tree down about a week ago.

Today, however is Candlemas. Or the feast of the presentation of the Lord. Or forty days after His birth when Mary, his mother goes to the temple now that she’s purified after giving birth to Jesus.

The nights are shorter, the days longer. Spring is just around the corner; if we can get through the next few weeks. The sun is bright if not warm. (I need my sunglasses more in the winter than in the summer in fact.)

With more natural light, we use less artificial light. We’re also brightened a bit more. Smiling a bit more. Less aggravated; more tolerant. Even that little bit helps, and it gets more and more as each day passes with its lengthening sunlit afternoons.

I’m thinking that we could have left the tree up another week and it would have been alright.

I’ll have to try that next year now that I’ve put Candlemas on my calendar again.

New Year, Not So New Me

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Plans, resolutions, goals, intentions, lists, stuff, things. They all need to be made and to be got done. Today is the first day of the first full week of 2016, and lucky for me I didn’t make any tangible resolutions other than to be more thoughtful and meditate on what I want this year to be and to bring and what I want to bring to it. I’ll set the tangibles a few more weeks into the calendar.

Christmas was quite lovely in that dull normalcy that we both crave and wish would be more exciting. I loved it. The kids were home, enjoying home and hearth and gifts by the tree. One son working, one son building Lego, my daughter rearranging her room and making her bed. Everyone in their own little worlds, but joining in the bigger world of our family for movies and food.

I was up early today, but then a second wind of tired blew in, and I laid down for just a minute. An hour later and it was snowing and my whole day melted away. I stayed in bed.

I can feel the sun trying to peek out, but the roads are still snow covered. I need a birthday snack for my daughter’s classroom for tomorrow plus a birthday cake for home. Plus tonight’s dinner. There goes the snowplow. That means more snow than it looks from my snow speckled, cozy window. I don’t want to go out in the snow!

My new me of getting up early, planning my writing calendar, and setting up my new blog format will come. After all, this first full week has just begun, and I have plenty of time to catch up.

Let the lists begin and the dressing commence.

My baby hits double digits tomorrow. Maybe that’s what I’m really avoiding. No, no; the library book is calling me. I’m sure that’s it.

Happy New Year to all whatever it may bring; or what we may bring to it.