Season's Greetings. . .

And I do mean the whole season.

You know, for me it starts the Friday before Thanksgiving and it ended last night when we put Calvin on a flight back to Houston. Cue the goodbye gloomies. I know I’m crazy and I know I’m spoiled. Not everyone gets to spend Christmas with their kids on U.S. soil safe and sound. But I’m slow to change, in some ways still getting used to the four of us not living here, though it has been seven years. The twisting of the heart and mind to wish that we could all just live here forever in Eagan with visits from Janel and family is delusional. As Oleta Adams sings it for me on every New Year’s Day, Everything Must Change. The only hope to break me out of such a funk is that God’s timing is always perfect and the next thing is always good. Don’t wish it away. I haven’t completely accepted that my own sister went to college and moved away and got married. She retired this fall. Faith winters eternal. And Mary is still home a little bit longer. We can go gently back into that great empty nest.

It was a magical season. All of it.

But now it’s Saturday, January 3, 2026 and it’s just a day at home with old snow on the ground outside and almost all the Christmas decorations still up. It takes me a month to put it all up and it will take a month to put it all away. But, the stockings are down. I put away Diane’s needlepoint stockings first, because I don’t want them to fade from the winter sun coming through the window. We have a couple dozen heirloom Christmas stockings of various sizes, each personalized with trains, bunnies, piano keys, and saxophones. The first Christmas Bill and I were married I got my big one. She must have started sewing it when we got engaged the Christmas before. It has beautifully wrapped stitched gifts with gold bows and textured wool yarns and my name at the top. All she knew about me then, was that I liked to give prettily wrapped gifts. Her stockings are finished with velvet backs. She taught me to store them with tissue paper between them so any metalic threads would not damage the strong but fragile wool stitches. When you make that mental list of things you would save in a fire, the needlepoint stockings box is right up there. It’s high enough on a shelf in my basement Christmas closet to survive almost any flood. It isn’t possible that this is the fourth Christmas without Bill’s mom. It was just a moment ago we were bringing her amaryllis and hauling the keyboard to Hill’s Crossing to sing some carols. And one moment before that we were all at the big house in New Brighton under a fifteen foot Christmas tree with a million gifts she wrapped.

Yes, I have a Christmas closet. Back behind the basement shop, or what used to be a shop but is now a photo processing room. Everything must change. That one was easy.

We joined Mount Olivet church this May and Bill was baptized there in July. It’s making me very happy. I was even offered an accompanying gig there with a just right commitment. I’m playing for three of their children’s choirs. I still have dreams about Easter Church, and a large percentage of my Facebook friends are Easter people. I’m eternally grateful that we raised our kids there. Twenty-one years. Two baptisms, two confirmations and a million musical moments. God always gives the right thing at the right time. I played for three services on Christmas Eve and I’m proud to be involved at our new church in Minneapolis. It’s still a change.

This is Oliver. We almost lost him in December. That would have been three cats in one year with this one being particularly priceless. I was not ready for that. I put my life on hold for a week, laid down the credit card, and we pulled him through. The same vet who helped me alleviate Rosie’s suffering in September moved heaven and earth to save this orange cat in December. The itemized list of surgery, procedures, and medications was several pages. I even kept a spreadsheet similar to the one after Mary’s leg surgery to keep track. All this, with Mary trying to study for Latin, Ancient Greek and Counterpoint finals three hundred miles away. You see, this is the orange cat who was there for her, when Calvin left for college and when she studied at her little desk in her little upstairs room for a year of covid school, the cat who sat on her lap in the wheel chair with her two broken legs for a whole summer. Not on my watch. Not before Christmas.

Melody was not concerned.

In another installment of changes I cannot accept, there’s Kowalski’s leaving Eagan. In my darker hours I might still sit in the parking lot for a moment of silence after my next-door yoga class.

Change of tone. Thank goodness we can stop at the other locations after church now. I still don’t know where things are, but it is better to have had a Kowalski’s down the street and lost. . . than to have never had one at all.

What have we been doing? Since that lovely pre-thanksgiving Friday, we’ve seen cousin Sam, and Janel, we’ve had friends and family to the cabin, seen outdoor fireworks in Nisswa, We nursed a sick cat and my students played three recitals at retirement homes. The kids had finals and juries. Bill traveled a lot. We hosted two Christmas recitals with over 70 people at our house. We had friends for fancy dinners on a couple occasions and celebrated Christmas at least three times with three tree-fulls of gifts. Ann and Dave brought R.W. for Christmas Day at our house. We are not messing around here. I am a Christmas professional. The presents got wrapped, the cookies and candies got baked, the meals got planned. Candles were lit. I got to pretend I was Norwegian with my new green Norwegian sweater. Mary made me her own heirloom wool ornaments that could have been Norwegian. We left for Iowa on the 26th where Janel served us four days of Christmas with my sister Susan and Ray.

Monday I return to the real world. I let myself be gloomy last night and a bit today, but I’m teaching in Dallas next weekend and my students have deadlines and concertos to prepare, we have a chamber music mini Red Pines workshop at our house at the end of January and the world will keep on turning right till our concerto event in May. Probably after that too if I’m honest.

Season’s greetings. And may this next season of mid-winter not be bleak, but blessed with health, wisdom, light, music and love.

Sara