GLITTER EVERYWHERE!!!

December is the time for family and close friends to get together, spend quality time together, and give your best gift. Gifts can come in so many forms. It can be a physical form of a wrapped item; it can be in a card form for a gift of service; it can be an act of service; it can be the quality time one on one over dinner or coffee; it can also be as simple as showing up and your presence is gift enough.

Deciding what the best gift is can be the hardest thing to figure out. When it is hard for one to simply show up for any occasion the gift of presence, act of service, or quality time is a no-brainer. However, when it is a regular occurrence for one to show up, then one would feel those kinds of gifts are not going to be enough to show appreciation or love.

But that is just one side of the story of gift-giving. How does one know that a certain act of service or one’s simple presence is what the receiver truly wants? There is a certain amount of understanding of the receiver to know what the best gift could be.

Did you know there is something called “Love Language”? We all have a way to feel most loved. Some need physical gifts. Others feel most loved with a simple walk through a park together. There are apps or online questionnaires that can be taken to find out an individual’s love language. Here is a link for the curious ones: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes

Then there are people like me: obsessed with packaging. Every Christmas, I will get several different wrapping paper and ribbons. No 2 presents are wrapped the same. Even if the presents go under different trees. Not all of them will have glitter and sparkles, but some will. Some may have more glitter and sparkles than others. I don’t know why I am obsessed with the outside of a gift. Because of this, once a year, my house will be covered in glitter for about a month. No amount of vacuuming can help it until I am completely done wrapping. 

One year, I found an amazing wrap that had tons of glitter and sparkles on it. I had to have that wrapping material, it was not paper. I wrapped my parents-in-law’s Christmas present in it. I didn’t realize how much glitter had fallen off of it until I put it in a bag to take to them. It was so bad I could hardly see the floor!!! 

Should I rewrap? Should I leave it and hope it won’t be as bad when it is getting unwrapped??? I pondered on that for several days and finally decided it shouldn’t be as bad unwrapping. The present gets handled more during the wrapping process, not during the unwrapping process. I told myself everything will be fine.

Christmas day came and the plan was to go to my in-law’s home to enjoy Christmas with my husband’s family in conjunction with mine. We had quite a few people! A merry Christmas indeed! As I talked I could hear everyone else having conversations in the background and children’s laughter and shrieks from excitement. 

It came time for opening gifts, once we were all full from dinner. My mother-in-law had a way of passing out gifts one by one so we can all see what we all got and from who. So we were all sitting around the tree watching family and friends open their gifts, patiently waiting for our own gifts to open. My mother-in-law pulled my gift out addressed to her and her husband. “Oh, look! This one is for us!” She sits down by her husband to open it together. As she starts pulling at the strings, the GLITTER….. OH MY GOD! I should have taken the time to rewrap it. By the time she was done unwrapping it, the glitter was all over her lap, her couch, and the floor around her feet. I felt horrible! There really was nothing I could do at that point…

Before we left that night, my mother-in-law had already dragged out the vacuum cleaner and was telling us the glitter had already made it down the hallway to the bedrooms and spare bathroom. Her son was visiting for the holidays and so there was more traffic down that hall than usual.

A couple of days later, her son came over to visit us at our home. He then mentioned his mother’s obsession with vacuuming every day, several times a day! Apparently, during one of her vacuumings, she mentioned something about banning me from using so much glitter ever again. No matter how much she vacuumed, more would appear out of nowhere later on. Needless to say, I have been very conscious of the type of glittery stuff I buy for gift wrapping now. 

Either way, I love the feel of having everything under the Christmas tree looking amazing as a whole, but also to have each look amazing on its own. It is so important for us to give the same amount of care for ourselves.  

We all deserve the same treatment as my Christmas gifts. Dedicate yourself to looking and feeling amazing inside and out. Have the intention to level up your lifestyle for yourself in 2022. Martha and I have a Gift Set that can get you started on that path of intention.