Love Is Kind

As I may have mentioned a time or two before, we dearly love Christmas around here. In this house we start listening to Christmas music during that first temperature drop of Autumn, usually sometime in October, and we begin decking the halls the day after Thanksgiving.

This year Luke and Elizabeth were too impatient to wait till morning, so we dragged the tubfuls of Christmas decorations out of the shed and into the house as soon as we all got home Thanksgiving night. The kids set right to work unpacking stuff and strewing it all over the floor and furniture. Actually arranging things in a decorative manner is my job; they just want to play with all the shinies.

On Sunday I got tired of tripping over the half-emptied tubs, so I sorted through them to see what-all could go back into the sheds until later (the tree doesn’t come in until a week before Christmas, for various reasons) and what still needed to be unpacked for immediate hall-decking.

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is buying one special ornament each year to commemorate some recent event or current interest. This began twelve years ago, the first time Steve and I celebrated Christmas as husband and wife. I selected a little “wedding bells” ornament that year:

It was nothing fancy, because we couldn’t afford anything fancy, but much like my $7 sterling-silver engagement ring I loved it for what it symbolized. Or, you know, what I thought it symbolized. Whatever.

So Sunday I was going through the tubs, and I came across a box that holds some of these commemorative ornaments. I looked inside and saw that the kids had already emptied it of its treasures.

Except for the wedding-bells ornament. They had left that tucked away inside the box, presumably so that I wouldn’t see it and be saddened by those memories.

It was a little thing, a small thoughtful gesture, nothing huge. But it touched me. It was a simple little reminder that we’re in this together and we want each other to feel loved and cared for. The whole spirit of Christmas in a minor act of kindness.

Happy Love Thursday, everyone, and happy holidays!