Winter and endings and hopeful beginnings

The colder weather is here and all of a sudden it feels like winter. I keep spotting the last of the berries on trees and hedgerows, hearing magpies fighting and cackling in our back garden, resembling very much the types that have left things to the last minute and have been caught out. The boys and I have taken great joy in peering into houses and admiring peoples christmas trees along our school route and I have watched two boys exhaling air and pretending to blow smoke circles, just like I remember doing when I was a kid. Winter signals that the year is coming to a close, another chapter almost gone. I feel a little overwhelmed, a little unprepared to say goodbye to this year. I'd like to think that enough years have passed now for me to know that it's not healthy to dwell on missed opportunities and wishes that haven't quite come true, to not beat myself up for not ticking off items on my to do list for the year. I'm sure I'll get around to writing some words reflecting on the passing of the last twelve months as I did last year and the year before that, well if the mood takes me that is. I'm left at the end of this year with a rather plain and surrendering sense of 'it's enough'. 

It's enough. 

It's enough fear, it's enough of being too scared to dream and to dare to dream bigger than ever before. No regrets but a little sense of melancholy tells me to dream bigger next year, to try harder at what comes more easily. This last few months has felt like an uphill struggle, trying to do what doesn't come easily for reasons that don't altogether make much sense. Dream bigger. Mediocreness is suffocating, it doesn't allow space to breathe, it leaves a sense of something being missing. I don't want that anymore, it's enough! It's actually enough to just sit on the sofa with our woollen blankets, with me nagging the children to sit still and with hubby holed up in his chair in the corner of the sitting room right next to us drawing in his sketchpad. To sip wine, make hot chocolates with marshmallows on top, to watch the lights on the christmas tree and to think of loved ones near and far who gifted us with special decorations that sit on the tree year after year. To suck on peppermint flavoured red and white stripy candy canes, the ones that I pretend to buy for the children. To wait as long as possible under the blankets and then head to the cold kitchen to make real coffee, lots and lots of real coffee for my hubby and I. It's enough to find a forest that smells of pines to take a walk in, to make up for the fake tree in our house. To find a pub on the way back from our forest walk, one with a real fire that we can sit by, to make up for the lack of a log fire in our home. To finally get around to teaching my eldest boy to make mix tapes this christmas, 2015 has got to be the year of the Acquaye-Tonge's mix tape collection. To just be without a schedule or timetable or places to be at set times. To be able to just pop out to the cinema on a whim, to stay in pyjamas all day and finish all those books that I've half read.To play countless games of mankala (or owari where I'm from) and all those promised games of monopoly and cluedo and scrabble, in tribute to christmas day tradition when Grandma Peppermint was still alive. 

It's enough to want the simpler of things that we can all so easily be robbed of because of busyness and overspending and duty and overcommitting and guilt trips and losing sight of the real prize, all getting in the way. The four of us, in pyjamas all day long, good food and good coffee and music, good music. It's enough. Merry Christmas. That's all folks!

Happy memories from Christmas's past!