Things I Love (December 2024)
birthday kindness, making things, Middlemarch, being home
It has already been a month of celebrations. Rosie turned 17 last week, and yesterday, I celebrated my 43rd birthday. In light of all the festivities, here are some things I am loving this month.
I love making celebrations.
We do it simply here, but I love setting a day aside to celebrate a birthday. The night before, Randy watches a movie with the birthday girl or boy while the rest of us are upstairs getting the room ready for birthday breakfast. We set the table with gifts, do a little simple decorating, and leave it bright and cheery for the next morning. Gifts, favorite meals, usually a trip to a favorite restaurant make up the day. Rosie, Paloma, and I got to go to our favorite pizza place for dinner (Chicago’s). The waiter brought her a slice of cheesecake on the house. Which reminds me:
I love birthday kindness.
We have a local health store with a great smoothie bar (A to Zinc) that gives free birthday smoothies. Paloma went with me, and I got a Holiday Eggnog Smoothie. It was one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. I love it when local businesses do special things like this.
My sisters threw me a birthday party. A friend stopped by and dropped off a gift card to a favorite restaurant. My kids cleaned and decorated the table for my birthday breakfast. Paloma made me a beautiful apron. A friend sent little jars of delicious things in the mail for me (lemon paste, pepper jelly, lavender rhubarb jam!!!), there were notes, gifts, hand-drawn cards, offers of love and help around the house. Randy made me breakfast. It is nice to be loved. I love being celebrated.
Birthdays will always remind me of my mother. She was the heartbeat of all the celebrations that took place in our home growing up. I see that she was making a place for us to experience joy and friendship by faithfully, quietly serving us. She would supply the food, the decor, the home that was welcome and ready. And then she would let us fill it up with friends and extended family. She would join in as often as not, but when she wasn’t at the table playing board games with us, she was scrubbing pans in the kitchen so we could keep enjoying an evening.
I have realized that this is something that I truly love: Opening my home to the friends of my children. I confess that I am delighted and also a bit surprised that they like to be here. I am keenly aware of how much noise and chaos can be heard and felt in this home with nine children ages 9 months to 17 years. We are a lot to take in! But I am so thankful to God for bringing my children friends and giving me a home where we have space enough for them to hang around awhile. When I am in the kitchen, flipping burgers or baking brownies for a crowd, scrubbing pans or loading the dishwasher, knowing that my house is full of my happy children and the people they love, it makes me happy. It makes me feel a closeness with my mother, who also raised nine children. I didn’t realize I was like her in this way. I would like to tell her so. And to thank her.
I love being home. It is the place my soul can rest. Of course, I can get easily overwhelmed here as well. (If you picture my house as neat and tidy with everything in its place, I’m both sorry and happy to disappoint you. While I wish I walked through clean, spacious rooms with light billowing in from the windows, I am usually stepping over all manner of toys and books to get from one room to the next. I have the hope of one day mastering this unruly house.) But I love being here just the same. God knows that going somewhere with all of these little people is exhausting for me. I can see his kindness in the way he continually brings people here, into our life, into our home.
Randy and I teach music lessons three days a week, and what started as a way to use our skills to make a living has turned into God giving us a community of people that come to see us and share life together in weekly intervals. Through this small work of teaching, God has given us lifelong friends that have come to our home in 30-minute intervals for months or years. Our children get to spend time with many of these friends every week. It is such a blessing.
I love making things!
I am making some altered journals for a potter friend of mine. Every year, we swap a batch of journals for a batch of handmade mugs. I will get to take all of my children to the pottery shop and let them pick out a favorite mug. This bartering has made all the mugs we break less painful. (Because something is always breaking around here.) If we can get most of them to last a year, we will be okay!
Many of you have already seen Paloma’s journal. I am so happy to have our first order in production! I am overjoyed when we actually complete a big project. I have so many lists of ideas—but such a limited amount of time and energy to make them happen. So much of my life is in this season is small, hidden work and a quiet attempt at sincere faithfulness, without a finished product to show for my time. It is such a delight to see a project through from brainstorm to book in hand! I am thrilled with the quality of this journal, and we are already planning our next project with the same printing company. (Thanks so much to everyone who placed pre-orders and made it possible for us to place our first batch of journals!)
Middlemarch:
Speaking of the hidden life, after reading Joel Miller’s great review of George Elliot’s classic novel, Middlemarch, I decided to read it again. There are so many things to say about this great novel—all 800+ pages of it—but it hit me tenderly at a moment when I was feeling especially small and unseen in my life. The day before I finished Middlemarch a couple of years ago, I had a phone conversation with the aquisition editor at a large, well-known publishing company. I had hoped this second phone call was going to be the one where my life’s work would take on new meaning, that they would ask to publish my book and further the reach of my writing, and in so doing, validate that my writing was meaningful and worth publishing. The conversation was a small, but real heartbreak. I felt ridiculous for grieving so deeply for something so insignificant—in the grand scheme of things— as a book deal. But the grief was there all the same. The next day I read the last pages of Middlemarch. I was sweeping the kitchen when the last sentence of the book hit me straight in the heart:
“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
This book was a comfort to me at a tender moment and a call to rise up into the beauty and dignity of my own quiet, hidden life.
The days ahead will be full of small, but significant acts of love and kindness, making the holidays a time to cherish and remember. I am grateful for these little ones that God has entrusted to me. My prayer is that He will help me to love them well.
Sending hopes for a beautiful Christmas season for you and yours.
Mackenzie
New Heirloom Dolls:
Paloma’s dolls are mostly sold out, (thanks for all the wonderful support for our young artist!) but I just uploaded these two little handmade, hand-sewn felt dollies. Click an image to go to our family store to see the dolls (and other books and journals and things) that are still available.
From the family archive:
If a star did ever speak from sky, then come to Jesus surely would it cry
To a star gave heed the wisemen three, and by its light did find the babe with Mary…
I love this beautiful, worshipful Christmas song that Randy wrote last year. I hope you find it meaningful as well.
From the podcast:
My Book:
Now available wherever you buy books online.
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Until next week! May you see the beauty in your life in this and every sacred everyday.