Priceless Holiday Joy, For Free!
There seem to be so many people who can’t wait to go out & buy the newest, latest, “greatest” this, that, or whatever. As this season of compulsively spending exorbitant amounts of hard-earned money on often relatively useless items is upon us, we feel it’s important to offer up some new perspective(s) on this behavior pattern and perhaps inspire some devoted shoppers to try on something new this year.
It’s quite possible that the last few sentences might’ve caused a bit of a bristly reaction, but fear not, for we’ve got lots of warm, fuzzies ahead.
With the average cost of living being so much higher, we feel that having alternative ways of expressing love, appreciation, and honoring times of celebration can be done more from the heart, and less from the wallet.
We absolutely LOVE that this time of year brings so many people together, the amount of love that pours out, seemingly so much easier to express, the shared meals, quality time spent, acts of kindness, etc.
But the amount of focus given to gift-giving just seems to be getting more stressful and sometimes gets to where it begins to be too much and does more to undermine much of the true spirit of the holidays rather than to enhance it.
Many years ago, we began to wonder how holidays might feel if all that money usually spent on tons of presents, was instead redirected to provide more life experiences with one another rather than on material items.
And, ohhhh have we had a lot of fun with this!!!! We’ve been able to have longer visits with those we love, have been able to sometimes afford two mini-vacations a year instead of just one (or none!), we’ve pulled together resources to help support friends & relatives with getting things they truly need, and to sometimes help them out of rough patches.
For the little ones, we create homemade cards and handmade gifts. Oddly enough, they seem to understand without even being taught as to how much more value and meaning things have that are hand-crafted for one another.
No amount of anything bought in a store can come close to the feeling of giving and receiving acts of love and kindness from our hearts.
Do you have some favorite, fun, creative ways of sharing priceless life experiences to tell us about? Leave us a comment… we’d love to hear from you. <3