The Gifts of Winter

This is an excerpt from the weekly News-Loveletter. If you would like it sent to your inbox directly (with all the other juicy bits, including a mini joy practice), you can add yourself to my mailing list here.

First, apologies for skipping a week on our Newsletter. While recovering from holiday shenanigans, I had a whopping 65 people sign up for the free workshops I taught last weekend. I connected with each individually before and after, and that took a minute. You can join my last free workshop this Saturday (register here), and I will take that care with you as well. It’s something I love to do.

Our family migrated to the coast for Christmas. We found a cozy home on a secluded beach, and we walked, talked, cooked, and played a little music together. We watched movies and bounced the ping pong. We worked in unison, our laptops open to the early light of dawn. I love that every member of our family is an entrepreneur, living and working by our own design, learning from one another. What a support system, what a gift.

My favorite part of our family vacation (the kids are twenty and twenty-three now) commenced on Christmas morning. We gathered in the sun room and pulled blankets up to our chins as we cozied into recliners and sprawled across the couch. Steaming cups of coffee and tea rested on end tables or in our hands as we waited. I turned a smooth beach rock over and over in my palm meditatively as I prepared to listen. Seda handed her iPad to Trinidad, giving us the grandest gift of all — a read aloud of the first 95 pages from the first book in the series she is working on.

I met Seda at the Crook County Library about thirty-two years ago. She sat across the table from me in a writers group. Seda’s work has always shown promise, but she has never finished a novel. All of that is changing. For the first time ever, Seda has meticulously plotted out not just one novel, but the others that follow it. The details line up, the characters are consistent. And as a gift, she granted us passage into her fantasy world by sharing the beginning of the first novel with us on Christmas morning.

It was good. I mean, really good. We sat in rapt attention for hours, then brought it to the kitchen where we took turns reading and cooking until breakfast found its way to the table. Later than evening, we listened while frosting and filling the cherry chocolate cake. We sat beside one another and were transported together to a planet orbited by two moons. This is family magic. This is the magic of creation. This is worklove, and the finest gift I’ve ever received.

What gifts of the heart have you given and received through the winter? And which surprised you beyond your wildest dreams?