{"id":9185,"date":"2025-01-09T16:47:20","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T21:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/?p=9185"},"modified":"2025-01-09T16:47:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T21:47:20","slug":"365291-post-xmas-simplifying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/365291-post-xmas-simplifying\/","title":{"rendered":"365+#291: Post Xmas Simplifying"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some things that I learned about living lightly from the recent Christmas\/New Year holiday season are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Love deeply –<\/strong>\u00a0The most important thing is the loving interactions among family members. It goes beyond presents. Sure, we gave gifts to family members and received some nice ones, but the most important part of Christmas was reconnecting with family, learning what\u2019s been going on in their lives, enjoying their company \u2013 even though some of it had to be by Zoom because of distance.<\/li>\n
  2. Overall Shopping Strategy –<\/strong> Our family limited gift buying through each person being assigned a family member to buy a present for. (The kids were exempt from the name drawing.) Still, I pass on this classic shopping trope that applies to most shopping that doesn\u2019t involve necessities like food.
    \n*Wait a day.
    \n*Consider a One Month Ban on anything new.
    \n*1 in\/1 out.
    \n*Don\u2019t go into debt.
    \n*Make a list.<\/li>\n
  3. Cleaning up before and after – <\/strong>I did a lot of house cleaning in prep for out-of-town family visitors, BUT, I surprised myself by realizing that after everyone left, I had even more deep cleaning to do. I vacuumed more intensively, sorted through old stuff and now have an even cleaner, less cluttered house.\u00a0 It\u00a0 took\u00a0 time,but\u00a0 Hey!\u00a0 we\u00a0 were\u00a0 snowed\u00a0 in\u00a0 some\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 time\u00a0 anyway.\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Uncovering stuff for others –<\/strong>\u00a0All the sorting revealed a supply of some new socks plus quite a few lightly used winter socks, gloves, and caps plus a blanket to be passed on to those in need during these cold winter days.<\/li>\n
  5. BUT\u2026Cleaning my home is not enough.<\/strong> This only goes so far \u2013 I\u2019m reminded that now that the snow days are ebbing and we can get the car out of the garage, it\u2019s essential to resume and expand my service to those in need. Sure, I\u2019ll continue tutoring and working at the local soup kitchen, but I really need to push myself to multiply my social justice efforts to reach more people; more systemic change. How about you?<\/li>\n
  6. Looking ahead –<\/strong> All of the above leaves my office space still needing serious pruning of old work files since I am no longer doing many marriage and parenting workshops. Hmmm. This project still feels daunting. Maybe this Lent\u2026<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Some things that I learned about living lightly from the recent Christmas\/New Year holiday season are: Love deeply –\u00a0The most important thing is the loving interactions among family members. It goes beyond presents. Sure, we gave gifts to family members and received some nice ones, but the most important part of Christmas was reconnecting with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-days-365"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9185"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9192,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9185\/revisions\/9192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}