This year I am taking Christmas off. With all my health issues, I find I just don't have it in me to do all the things I usually do every holiday season.
For many years I have done everything from being in parades, organizing parties, sung in an acapella group, and let's not forget all the holiday hoopla that encompasses one's family around Christmas.
This season I just don't have the energy for it.
But there is still one thing that I did have energy for. One thing that brings me joy is to make gifts for all of the people I love out of the things I produce here on the farm, and this year I produced a surplus of calendula.
So, all the folks whom I adore this year are getting little jars of homemade calendula lavender salve. I mean, winter is the season of cracked hands and dried skin after all, and nothing says soothing like the application of some lovely salve.
So, for the last couple days I have been infusing the dried calendula flowers that I harvested and produced this summer into a mixture of olive and coconut oil. Instead of the standard 6-9 weeks it takes to slow infuse the oil, I got out my trusty crockpot, filled it partly with water, placed my canning jars full of oil and flowers into the water, and kept the whole thing at between 120-140 degrees Fahrenheit for about four hours. Oil infused.
I then made a double boiler out of some pots, measured out oil, added some grated beeswax, and steamed it until it was melted and combined.
The last addition was some lavender essential oil we distill right here on the homestead.
I also might have slathered more than a fair bit of the salve on my carcass too, because I just love the stuff.
At the end of a pleasant couple of days homecrafting, I now have a couple dozen jars of lovely, skin-soothing salve for my peeps. I also planning on baking a few things, and that's it. That's all I am doing this year. It feels rather, freeing.
For far too long I have put far too much on myself and am paying the price. The hard part is I absolutely adore giving to people. My time, my creations, my hospitality. I love to make people feel at home and valued.
But the one person I have been neglecting is, well, me. And this year I am going to give myself the gift of a much needed breather. Already I am feeling a positive difference.
Which is a good thing, because this next year is going to be a banger! (More on that later!)
But for now, for this month at least, I am truly embracing the peace that comes from letting all of it go and just basking in a spirit of gratitude and healing. Cause those a good things indeed.
Well, that and prodigious applications of salve😉
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's now in calendula and lavender scent iPhone. The text divider image was made in Canva.