When we were kids on Christmas day we would open presents, go to mass, eat our dinner about 12.30 and then sit down to watch TV. My mam would want to watch the Queen's speech and the rest of the family would groan. She would point out that she never watched anything else on TV and so we would conceed and sit through it. As I got older I found I was sitting down to watch it myself the same as the other traditions we have at Christmas only now with Sky plus so the Queen can fit around our day. After mass, visiting family and a huge dinner we sat round and watched herself.
I suppose you don't get to 90 in any walk of life without gathering pearls of wisdom and this year she talked a good bit about inspiration. 2016 has been an amazing year for us yet for many around us the end of the year can't come quick enough. At this time of the year we are looking ahead to the new year and looking for inspiration. The Queen said that the word 'inspire' literlly means 'to breath in' and this week is the time to pause and take a breath, think about the highs and lows of the closing year before we get too caught up in what we want to do in new year. All of us in our own way will have overcome, achieved and to the rest of the world have done something extraordinay (even if to us it just felt ordinary).
Our recent run of workshops and courses reminded me of one of the things I hoped to achieve through Lúnasa and one of the things, that for me, was hard to find when I first moved here. It was simply a regular coming together, not necessarily to learn, but simply to meet, to enjoy, and maybe to expand my social circle. So with that in mind I will be doing some events in 2017 that will achieve this starting with out swishing event in Jan. More about that later but for now a few days reflection and a final quote from Mother Teresa, from this year Saint Teresa of Calcutta once said 'not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.'
Seasons greeting to you and your loved ones x