Bru's Musings

I went to a Christmas party yesterday at the home of a colleague. She and her husband have been married only a couple of years, and the bought their current home shortly after marrying. The house nice, and their decorating is beautiful. Very "in". Even their Christmas decorations looked like something out of a store display - a tall, slim tree with coordinating ornaments, beautiful decorative odds-n-ends carefully placed around the room. I thought I might be a little envious. But as nice as it was, I realized it really does look like a store display. Very much a we-worked-really-hard-to-coordinate-everything look. But then I came home and looked at our mantle full of santas and the piano full of snowmen that people have given us over the years, and my tree with multi-colored lights and mostly one-of-a-kind ornaments, some handed down to me from my childhood that were made by my mother's own hand, some made by my son, some given to us by others who have been a part of our lives for a season. I thought about our newly-started tradition this year of shopping together for one (okay, three this year) new ornament each year. And I decided I wouldn't trade our decorations, our home, for any picture-perfect home. Ours is filled with memories, tradition, and love. It doesn't matter that everything doesn't match, because our lives aren't coordinated or picture-perfect. Our lives are a patchwork of people and experiences, and our home reflects that. I have sometimes regretted that our house isn't "complete" - there's painting to be done, decorating to do, yard projects to tackle. But I occurred to me that, like our lives, our home is a work-in-progress. And just maybe the joy of the journey is the point - not the finality of the destination.