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• Assemble cabinets.
• Figure out paint colors.
• Clean my house.
• Clean my bathroom.
• Do dishes.
• Do laundry.
• Take out the trash.
• Take my kids to preschool and classes.
• Feed myself and my children.
• Send out Christmas cards.
• Finish editing a chapter of my book.
• Write another blog post.

I usually feel guilty around Christmas time.

I can get presents for people, put up a fake Christmas tree, turn on some lights, and buy gingerbread house kits.

But Christmas is supposed to be focused on Jesus Christ and serving others, and to be honest, I struggle with making Christmas feel special in that way.

I feel like I do okay focusing on Jesus Christ and serving others on a day-to-day basis. But sometimes daily life feels like a lot (especially when you are doing a kitchen remodel), and doing more for Christmas time is hard.

I want to be able to serve other people and make this a good time for my children, but I don’t want to do it just because someone else tells me to and I feel guilty.

How do you serve others during Christmas time? Do you worry about making it a special time of year?

• Words of wisdom
• Love
• Comfort and empathy
• Knowledge
• Support
• Help
• Advice
• Prayers
• Connection
• Stories
• Music
• Faith

From various pages on the internet:

The ability to judge well.

Perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual guidance and understanding.

Grasp and comprehend what is obscure.

Recognize small details.

Decide between truth and error.

A particularly perceptive way of seeing things.

Keen insight.

Discernment is something that I have tried to develop. I can’t make decisions and I don’t notice details, but I do like to think on and understand life and living and morality and faith and people.

I was in a few committees for Christmas things. One of the committees was talking about anxiety in children and helping them feel better. The word special was thrown out there, but I just mentioned that special means something unusual and better than someone else, and so if everyone is special, no one is (thanks, Incredibles). And so instead of making children feel special, because not every child is particularly special, they just need to understand their worth where they are, even if it’s in the back of the pack and struggling. People usually just want to feel loved; they don’t need to feel special.

In another committee, we were talking about Christmas and giving presents. And I mentioned how sometimes giving presents isn’t really helpful, and you need to listen to people. People just want to feel remembered more than they need gifts at Christmas. So in that conversation, we decided to make notecards for people to write letters and notes to people who needed it.

I think maybe those are examples of a certain kind of discernment. About seeing people and understanding enough that you can understand how to help

I didn’t really choose the community I live in now. I live in a rural place, in a tiny, unincorporated town of a few hundred people. It’s right next to other smaller towns, but in the whole valley, the population is maybe around 5,000 people. It’s a bit of a disconnected and changing community, with some people connecting more to the nearby resort town and some people more involved in farming/agriculture. Some people are here because they have been here for ages; some people are moving in here to be up in the mountains.

I like it here. Most of the time. I don’t like how high the house prices are here. Sometimes I wish for more restaurants nearby (but I’m also glad that I don’t have them and I save money by not eating out much). I wonder if we lived in a bigger place, my kids might have more opportunities (but maybe they would have less).

I’ve lived in different places. I grew up in a town that had grew from a more agricultural community to a place that is very busy and crowded in not very long. I’ve lived in a rural town in Nevada with both a Family Dollar and a General Dollar. I lived in a very tiny town in Wyoming with a K-12 school with 7 people in the kindergarten and first grade class. And I also lived in the middle of nowhere for a while, 45 minutes away from Moab.

I really don’t have much experience living in the suburbs and anything urban. I didn’t decide to live in rural places; that’s just where life took me. And sometimes, when I drive into the city, I wonder what life would be like if I lived in a neighborhood with lots of families. Or if I could actually walk to somewhere. Or if I had to deal with parking issues. Or if everything was more expensive.

There are some places that are better than others (there is a reason we left Nevada).

But I like where I live when I am grateful for what I have. When I seek to make friends. When I got outside and explore. When I volunteer and get involved. When I fix up my house as if I’m going to live there for forever. When I plant trees and start groups and enroll my kids in sports and hope for the best.

It doesn’t really matter where you live. It matters more about how you choose to live there.

Also, I can own ducks and geese here, and that’s pretty cool.

In school, there are standards for each grade about what a child should learn. But we all know that that’s not how things work: some kids are behind and some kids are ahead. There are so many reasons for kids to be off schedule. Genetics. Wealth. Family situations. Something that happened generations ago that still affects those children.

Sometimes we try to easily identify those that are at a disadvantage, such as minorities or groups who have historically been oppressed. But life isn’t that simple. Those who have difficult circumstances don’t always fall into easy categories.

So it can be difficult to realize, especially from a policy perspective, that some people from privileged categories, like white males, are at a disadvantage. Not because they are white males, but because of things like intergenerational poverty, or genetics, or health problems, or being raised in the wrong neighborhood, or family problems.

And some people who belong to categories that are not usually privileged might actually enjoy a huge amount of advantages in their life.

I think the point is to realize that everyone isn’t the same, and there is uniqueness in life. We need to help those that need help, to see who they are and where they are. We need to realize that there are a wide range of people who struggle in all different places and in all different categories.

First, see if there is a writing group near you. If there’s not, then you might want to start one.

You have to be open about the fact that you write, so you can find other people who also write. My writing friends have come from online forums, family members, and book clubs. And then some of my writing friends knew other writing friends. Going to writing conferences is another good way to find other people who write (obviously).

Once you have at least one or two writing friends who live near you, you can start a writing group.

You can also contact your local library to see if they would be willing to help sponsor a writing group, providing publicity and a place to meet.

Then you have to decide what you want to talk about during your writing group meetings. You might want to:

• Share what you’re working on.
• Talk about the fears, successes, and failures of writing.
• Encourage each other to keep writing.
• Critique each other’s work.
• Talk about how to write better, including sharing writing process, advice from others, have to write better prose, how to develop characters, and etc.
• Talk about publishing, what success can look like, and what goals you have.

And you have started a writing group.

This morning, I was feeling anxious and worried because I made some decisions and I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do.

For example, there was an community event–it included a tree lighting and Santa–and I decided to stay home. But then when I saw a picture of it on social media, I immediately regretted what I had chosen.

When I make a decision, I try to forecast into possible futures and then choose which future is the best. But I don’t know if I’m forecasting accurately.

After I make a decision, I know what the results of one option. But the other option is still very much unknown.

So regret becomes really easy, because I can still fantasize about the road that I didn’t take.

I have to stop myself and remember that that pathway is not only still unknown, but also now impossible.

Regret is useful to make better decisions in the future, but wasting regret on the imaginations of what could have been isn’t sensical. I often regret decisions, even though nothing turned out badly–I just think that maybe another decision would have been better. But it’s better to only use regret when I don’t like the decision that I made, instead of just hoping that some other option would have been better.

I cooked Thanksgiving dinner yesterday and had some family over to eat it with me. We shared and ate and talked with each other. I enjoyed myself, and didn’t worry too much if everything was perfect. There was plenty of food, some of it was really good, some of it was adequate, but we all ate and had a good time.

I also planned a Christmas party with some other people, and a lot of the focus was on decorations, having things match, and making things look exactly right. I like those people, but I struggled in the meeting as I thought that none of these things really matter that much.

Food is the most important part of almost any party of event. If there is not enough food or the food isn’t good, there’s a problem. If the food is good, the event is good. Hungry people are generally unhappy people. Feed them with good food and they become happy.

Decorations and entertainment and music are all fine. But just get the food right, invite some people over, and everything else will fall into place.