Christmassy mood and some heartwarming advice

Before you look at all my beautiful Christmassy holiday-ish pictures, and before you start feeling insecure and compare yourself and feel inadequate because you didn't bake fancy cookies yet, or you didn't knit cute Christmas ornaments, or you don't have a handmade advent calendar or wreath... I want you to know this:

Christmas can be really, really hard.  So many expectations, so much to do, so much to strive for, so much comparison going on, so many pinterest-worthy ideas you will never implement...

I usually don't like Christmas all that much, because of the above-mentioned reasons, and because of all the yucky commercialism associated with it, and because of sad childhood memories involving Christmas in my homeland of Germany.

But since I have three children who happen to be totally into Christmas, I do try to get over myself and decorate the house, endure endless Christmas songs on the radio, and bake cookies.

And this year, I am actually really into this Christmas spirit thing.

I made an advent calendar for the kids, and they take turns opening one little gift every morning.  

We also decorated the tree without squabbling.

And I did knit some pretty cute ornaments this year...

About the whole cookie baking scene: My 12-year old son initiated a cookie baking session, and we all got into it.  We actually got pretty professional when it got to decorating the things, all with a little powdered sugar, sprinkles and cocoa.  I also discovered natural food coloring made with healthy ingredients.

Since the oven was on, I decided to make some Foccacia bread to go along with the sweet stuff.

In terms of decorating, we've been going nuts with paper snowflakes and evergreen wreaths.  

In fact, I filmed tutorials on how to make both of them, and if you want to be a patron of our blog, you can access them here at our Patron-only section of the website (along with my recipe and tutorial for making the best cheese cake you ever had).

I wrote an article on how to prevent and treat cold and flu for our local magazine Grow Northwest, and Steve and I did a Facebook Live about it where we teach how to use our favorite natural remedies for cold and flu.  If you want to watch us (we are pretty fun), you can watch that here.

One of the things I talk about in the article and video is how to make natural cough syrup with onion and honey, and the other is a recipe for a ginger/lemonade/cayenne drink to help your immune system.

And talking of drink, I'm in full swing making lots of Kombucha.  I teach how to do this for the fraction of the cost of buying it here.

Also, we bottled our hard cider we made in the fall.  It's good!  Potent!  Talk about medicine!

My parting words today:  If you have a hard time with Christmas, it's okay.  You are not alone.  If you love Christmas and you think I'm nuts saying anyone could feel conflicting emotions around it, it's okay, too.  I'm happy for you!

For the rest of us, let's just take the good about this holiday season: the love, the light, the giving spirit, the good food, the generosity.

Allow yourself to relax a little.  It doesn't have to be perfect, okay?  Light candles.  Slow down.  Kiss your loved ones.

Sending a huge amount of love to y'all!

PS: If you want to support this blog, please go here and do it.  Thank you!!!