My sweet mom comes in on Saturday for our annual Christmas shopping/wrapping week. She lives in Washington so I don’t see her enough. She works for Expedia, outside of Seattle, so she doesn’t get away as often as she likes. And with the kids schedule, it’s just easier for her to come to us! When she visits, I always realize that I needed her special touch in my house. That I needed her help.
She always comes to visit the weekend following Thanksgiving weekend and stays an entire week! She has more energy than I do. I don’t know where she gets it, finds it, hides it or drinks it from but I wish I had some! I am pretty sure that is her in a bunny suit on the Energizer commercials. She always knows when and where I need help, too…even when I don’t/won’t ask for it. I don’t know how she does it but when she leaves, she will have gone through my entire house and organized the whole thing top to bottom, cooked all the dinners, cleaned all of the dishes, helped wrap all of the gifts we procure through the week and handled her own job back at Expedia! My kids always talk about “if Nana was here, she would have had this done yesterday”. She is amazing!
She loves organizing. I mean, L.O.V.E.S. organizing. Now, I like to be organized. I like to open drawers and see everything in its place and closets with labels and cabinets with everything in alphabetical order. But, truth be told, it isn’t natural for me like it is for her. It is a true task for me. It takes me a long time to do what she does in a matter of minutes. I really have to work at it. She has a knack for it. It is part of her DNA.
“It’s a visual thing”
Her saying is “it’s a visual thing”. She lives by it. She will walk into a room and make it look like a perfectly organized space in 5 minutes and actually can’t move on until it is neat and tidy. I wish that gene was more predominant in me, but it skipped me and went to two of my daughters. I am the more…creative type and tend to fly a little more by the seat of my pants. It took my mom 50 years to actually paint a room anything other than white! It took me a long time to convince her it would be ok. We balance each other out like that. I help her do things that she isn’t good at or confident in doing and she helps me out, too.
She has even started a professional organizing business on the side called SOS – Sorting and Organizing Solutions up in Washington. Whatever the organizing project is that needs to be done, she will do with ease. She is called in to tackle the smallest of jobs like a closet. But, she is also asked to do the bigger ones, too. Like an entire move!
She has organized many of my moves (probably all and there have been a lot) and helped me unpack and organize. We always joke that we don’t know what we are going to do once all of the boxes are gone and there is nothing left to organize. I always tease her when she comes to my house, and it isn’t as organized as she thinks it should be, that “I left it like this for you so you would feel needed”. Because, no matter how old our children get, we always want to be needed in some way by them, right?!
After we shop for everyone, we love to wrap everything in my craft room (here). It is the perfect space to hang out, drink coffee in and listen to Christmas music as we wrap. I specifically made a peninsula large enough for both of us to use it at the same time. She is an excellent wrapper, which is where I acquired my excellent wrapping skills. And she acquired them from her mom. The kind of wrapping where the creases are just right and no seam is out of place. We will be posting some of our creative wrapping here next week.
I always enjoy this time of year and this particular week. It has become a tradition for us and we always make it happen. This is a week that I become a person who loves the mall. We will head out with Christmas lists, find the best deals and order what needs to be ordered. When she leaves we will have sung 100 Christmas songs, drank countless cups of coffee, had a few glasses of wine, reorganized the ornaments on the tree, fluffed everything we can, purged something, and spent hours creatively wrapping our treasures. And I can’t wait!!
And then we will do it all again next year! What are your favorite Holiday traditions with your mom?
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