Letter 46: Celebrating the Everyday
When we have a "Movie Disco"
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Happy last Wednesday in April!
Can you believe we’re at the end of April this week? In teacher world (at least in the South), the end of April is the home stretch into the end of the school year. As Molly wrote in Beth’s intro last week, teachers have it tougher than ever before. With teacher appreciation week approaching next week (May 2-6), I love that we get to hear from teachers like Beth and Kara who are in the thick of it and working with the next generation.
Kara is an incredible teacher, friend, and mom, and it’s such an honor to know her and work alongside her. I hope you enjoy her letter and that you find inspiration in how to make even the most mundane days worth celebrating.
One of the things I love about this time of year is its lack of major holidays. The end of a school year and beginning of summer certainly come with their own brand of chaos, but that long stretch between Easter and the fourth of July feels in some ways blissfully free of expectations. October through December are chock full of celebrations and joy, but those big-name holidays tend to bring with them a lot of baggage. They involve intense calendaring, decorating, managing family dynamics, and lots and lots of expectations just waiting to not be met. I don’t want to sound too Ebenezer Scrooge here. I do enjoy these holidays and all they bring along with them. But, I find that doing it big, which is what big days usually demand of us, tends to leave me feeling more like success is in meeting all those expectations rather than just in finding joy through the act of celebration.
My husband and I have always found that celebrating the small days—our own quirky little holidays happening in our own quirky ways—is so much more meaningful than celebrating all the big days. For us, the most special days are the holidays we’ve created. Housiversary, when we sit on the fireplace hearth and have wine and cheese every April 15, just like we did 12 years ago on the day we bought our house. Sushiversary, when we eat sushi every January 7, just like we did on the night we got engaged. First Day of Sweaters, when we wear our sweaters and go out for cocoa or cider on the first day of cool weather (or at least what passes for cool weather in Texas). Celebrating days like these helps to give us a way to make days like April 15 and January 7 special without all the baggage of days like December 25.
When March 2020 hit, like so many other households, we found ourselves suddenly working and parenting in wholly new and, frankly, awful ways. Between my husband and me both working full-time jobs from home, my daughter doing online Kindergarten, and all of us just trying to keep the two-year-old occupied and alive without daycare, the days very quickly bled into one uniform mass of exhaustion and sameness. After just a couple of weeks, I saw the need to do something to mark our weekends as such—a way to make Saturday and Sunday somehow stick out from the rest of the week as special, different, and possibly even fun. A way to celebrate making it to the end of another week in this crazy new way of life we were living. From this urge was born the “Movie Disco,” a name coined by my oldest daughter.
It all started with some place-and-bake cookies in the shape of trolls’ heads. I’d bought these sometime in February, thinking they’d be a fun treat and forgotten them in the back of the refrigerator as the world disintegrated around me. In late March, I saw them there and thought, sure, let's make cookies. And since they’re troll cookies, let’s splurge on an Amazon rental of Trolls World Tour. And since we’re doing that, maybe I’ll print off a couple trolls coloring sheets, and I think I saw on Pinterest one time how to make a trolls hair headband. We’ve got some extra tulle ribbon, so we can do that. In the end, we had a pretty fantastic trolls party with just supplies we already had in the house.
It was a hit and made the day feel really special. So, we followed it up with basically the same routine every Saturday. I found Minion popsicles available for grocery pickup, so we had a Despicable Me disco. We got out a few of our fall decorations for a Frozen 2 disco and baked gingerbread cookies for The Grinch. We sliced up plastic yellow tablecloths and braided them into long Rapunzel braids for Tangled. By the time the school year ended in May, we’d managed to throw ourselves a movie-themed disco party every Saturday, using mostly supplies from around the house and a few little treats from grocery pickups. (We recently reprised the movie disco when we were quarantined for a couple of weeks after my oldest daughter—now seven and still living this pandemic life—tested positive. We watched Encanto, made our own butterfly pins out of Perler beads and yarn, and got some takeout arepas.)
I realize that in all this, I’m very much running the risk of sounding like some kind of Pinterest-perfect super mom. I assure you, that is not the case. I do love to throw a party in the best of times. (I think I can still remember those.) But, these were not pursuits of scrapbook-worthy perfection, but desperate and improvised attempts by an exhausted mom to just make one day a week seem like something worth getting to. The crafts often fell apart as we made them, the coloring pages were almost always unfinished, and Minion popsicles, it turns out, are incredibly disgusting. But, in the end, these things brought a little joy to my kids in a dull and difficult season.
This is the kind of attitude of celebration I want to cultivate in myself and my family even in our not-so-desperate seasons. I want to find joy in everyday things and celebrate the memories that are important to me, even if they wouldn’t occur to anyone else. I’ll give the big days their due, but I know that, for me at least, our little Housiversary and Sushiversary traditions, and the occasional movie disco, are where I can find even more joy than under the Christmas tree.
Kara’s Five Favorites
A great guide to simple celebrations all year round is Myquillyn Smith’s Welcome Home. I learned a lot from this book, but the thing that has stuck with me the most is the idea of having two or three small areas of your house where you change out decorations to fit the season- this keeps things festive without overloading the decor you have to store.
Bunting and garland just feel like a party to me, so adding some to the large window behind my dining table is one way I decorate for the season. I just took down my little string of carrots for Easter and am getting ready to hang some brightly colored pom-poms in that space for summer.
Another area in my home for seasonal decor is a beautiful handmade wooden bowl that I received as a wedding gift. It sits on our dinner table year-round and gets different fillers for different seasons- little pumpkins in fall, pinecones in winter, flowers in spring, and lemons in summer.
The last spot for my seasonal decor is a little basket on the end table by my couch, where I switch out different children’s books for each season. Goldfish on Vacation by Sally Lloyd-Jones is a great story with beautiful artwork that will definitely be on display this summer.
That’s it! With just three little pieces of seasonal decor, my house is all set for summer and feels like a little celebration every day. This last thing bringing me joy is that when fall rolls around, I can pack all that up in a small box or even a tote bag and throw it in the top of a closet. Then I’ll pull out my fall garland, vase filler, and children’s books and it’ll feel like a celebration all over again.
With gratitude,
Kara Purschwitz
P.S. How do you ring in the change of seasons in your home? Do you have any special traditions that you celebrate with your family?
What a wonderful post! I love your creativity and flare to go it your own way for making things special with your family!