Hanging on to the one thing

When I was about to get married I heard from somewhere that there will be one thing that you really want to happen and that for some reason everything will go wrong with that one thing and you can’t let it get you down. Now I don’t remember what my thing was with that but this past week I had to let go of a couple of things. One was my sister’s stuffing. A few years ago for Thanksgiving she made me a ‘vegetarian’ stuffing. It had apples and celery in it and was simply delightful. Since my sister was off to visit our extended family and both of phones were in and out of service I wasn’t able to call her to get the recipe. So I tried to make it from scratch and it actually would have turned out ok, but the first batch got burned. No big deal I thought, after all this year I get to go to two Thanksgivings, how lucky am I? I’ll just make it again. But alas, the second batch also got burned. (As I am having to learn that being stuck on my rump in a cast and having to wait on others to serve me just about constantly will mean that things get burned, forgotten or left off.)
The second was decorating for Christmas. Remember I made a big fuss about it? Well again, with a cast on it’s a little harder this year and I thought my hubby’s school stuff would calm down but alas it is getting more frenzied as the semester crescendos. So I put up our Charlie Brown fake tree and chatted on line with Bobeesah and felt like it was the next best thing to actually having her here. The next day when Kaiya got up I had saved some ornaments for her and it was so adorable watching her stab the ornaments into the tree, completely missing the branches. And that’s all that is done, as the lights are broken again (why do they always break?) and the garland is all tangled and for some reason the stockings are AWOL.
Here’s the thing though, both of my Thanksgivings were fabulous and honestly I ate so much my gut hurt for the next three days so there was no room for stuffing. And my Christmas decorations are still, um, a work in progress, it is getting there. And though it seems everything is slower with a toddler, it is also fuller, and the latter is definitely worth the trade off. So my challenge is to you if there is a big event or holiday and something you have your heart set on is falling apart to just let go of it and see if the thing was really so necessary after all.