A New Attitude

Christmas in the post-War United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“If you will live like no one else, then later you can LiVe like no one else.” ~ Dave Ramsey.

It hit me today – a variation on that idea – and that is this:  “If you are living like no one else, then you can start giving like no one else.”

It’s Black Friday.  Millions of shoppers crowded stores like Target, Walmart, Best Buy to be one of the first customers to get that $400 TV for $150 – or some other “Made in China” crap – while canned Christmas music fills the air amidst disgruntled shoppers and cashiers telling customers how much they owe.  And owe and owe and owe, plus interest.

I wasn’t one of them.  My family and I headed to the North Carolina Farmer’s Market today, a treat we seldom get to enjoy since we moved out of that area.  Before going, though, my husband and I had discussed our plans for Christmas gifts this year.  Some people are so easy to shop for, and others are so incredibly challenging.  But this year, we’ve decided we’re going to give gifts that we can afford, not what we want people to think we can afford.

Homemade gifts are nothing new for us.  We’ve given pillows, tins of cookies and confections, soaps, dipping oils, extracts and other treats, all made by us (me, mostly).  I was raised, though, that homemade gifts aren’t that special, that it’s better to buy gifts from a store so the recipient can take them back.  Then I became an artisan crafter and people loved getting products from me that they didn’t have to buy.

There’s still that part of me, though, that wonders what people think when I give them something.  Do they feel stuck with the gift I carefully chose for them, that another artisan made with love and care?  Today, my thinking shifted in a huge way.  This morning, I thought, “I don’t care.”  Really, truly don’t care.

We give gifts carefully, and there’s nothing so exciting to me as finding that great gift and it practically shouting, “This is for ______!”  The package comes (if it’s something I’ve ordered), and I get to open it, then I get to wrap it – maybe in a box, maybe in a handmade cloth gift bag – and watch with excitement as my friend or relative opens it.

But to elaborate on the “I don’t care” part…  Pretty much everyone in our families knows we’ve been on a path toward financial peace this year.  Some of them have shared with us in the huge victories (clearing all our credit card debts), huge frustrations (wiping out 70% of our brand-spankin’-new emergency fund when my car needed repairs) and a few know the huge heartbreak that came over the Summer.  In short, they know we’re trying to do something new and great in our lives.

I won’t go into the specifics of what we’re giving so as not to spoil any surprises, but as the discussion unfolded this morning, I became excited.  Sure, I’d like to give more than what we’re giving, but I’m excited about what we’re giving for a few reasons:

1. We’re giving what we’ve made with our own hands, so each gift comes with a heapin’ dollop of love.
2. We’re giving as we are to protect out own reality, not someone else’s perception of our reality or what that reality “should” be.
3. Our giving in this way allows us to be more generous to those who have far less than we do.
4. By giving like this, we experience freedom:  Freedom from “must buy” syndrome and freedom to spend more time at home.  Or out looking at lights.  Or Christmas caroling.  Or at parties.  Pretty much anything but shopping.

Baby Step 7 is “Build wealth and give.”  We’re not even through Baby Step 1 for the second time, but I’m ready to give now.  That’s what my immature (??) red-faced kid is screaming for.  Maturity says I can’t give away wealth I don’t have, but I can give what I do have.

What creative ways have you discovered for saving money, time and stress during the holidays?

Related articles

• Green gifting (greenreview.blogspot.com)
• It’s a Christmas wrap (johnlewis.com)
• Christmas: the Gift That Surpasses All……. (jeremylum88.wordpress.com)
• When the Retailers’ Black Friday Puts You in the Red (fulltimewritermom.com)

How to Wash a Cat

This is another one of those “Does anyone else go through this?” posts.

Yesterday, my toddler, the Wee Princess, had had her nap and she was revved and recharged for all sorts of wee mischief.  It started when I heard the back sliding glass door open.  The air conditioner was on, so I wanted that door shut.  I told her to shut it, and she did.  A few minutes later, I heard it again.  Then I heard the screen door open.  What?  That was supposed to be locked way up high where she couldn’t reach.

I called her name, and she responded, “I outside.”  I told her to come back in, and she did, as I walked over to the door.  Then she said, “Sassy outside.”  Ugh!  I told Sassy, the girls’ cat, to get inside, and she did.  My husband had forgotten to lock the screen door when he came in last night.  Great.  I locked both the screen and the sliding glass door, and Wee Princess followed me to the living room.

I went back to my work, and she toddled off to the office – and shut the door.  This can’t be good.  I waited, ears open, tuned toward that corner of the house.  After a minute of silence, I went to see what she was doing.  She’d found a sample of lotion and was rubbing it on her legs.  She told me she’d gotten some on the floor (“That’s OK, sweetie.”) and proudly announced she’d put some on the cat, too.  Oh.  god.  I look at Sassy and see that she has lotion all over her back that she wants desperately to lick off, but she can’t stand the scent.

It’s now past time for me to start getting ready to meet a friend for dinner, but first, I have to bathe Sassy.  So, here’s the heart of this post:

(1)  Carry the cat upstairs, being careful not to get lotion all over you, and being careful of the razor-like claws.

(2) Go into the bathroom and shut the door.  Lock it so curious children can’t open it and let the cat escape.

(3) Ignore the loud, plaintive cries of said cat.

(4) Start bath water, letting it get to a nice, warm temperature.  Get shampoo and towel ready.

(5) Ignore cat-from-hell screams now coming out of cat.

(6) Assure daughters that the cat – and you – are perfectly fine and no one is hurt.

(7) Put cat into tub, being sure to get her head and face wet.  Ideally, this will calm her down so you can bathe her.

(8) Dodge kung-foo swinging claws and ignore cat-from-the-very-deepest-bowels-of-hell screams.

(9) Quickly shampoo cat and rinse the shampoo out of her fur.

(10) Grab a towel to wrap around the cat when she jumps out of the tub.

(11) Still avoiding the knives on the tips of her paws, towel dry her fur.

(12) Give the cat a sprig of catnip and a can of salmon in an attempt at making things better.  It won’t work, but cats like their humans reminding them who really runs the house.

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Just Not Good Enough

Ever feel like what you have isn’t good enough to share?  That you wouldn’t mind sharing it to make someone feel better, but you want what you have to be better first?  You’d give up a bed for a weary traveler, but you want your home to be cleaner.  You’d give your children’s old toys to a family who has no toys, but the toys are too used to give to someone else.  You’d even give water to a homeless person standing on the side of the road in the summer’s heat, but you can’t give them the spare bottle you filled from your own tap; it should be originally bottled, seal still in place.

I’m just as bad about these things.  I worry what people will think when what they want isn’t perfection; it’s an easing of their misery.  This came to me this morning sitting in church.  I was sitting beside a lady I didn’t recognize, someone fairly new to our church.  About midway through the service, she started coughing.  Buried in the bottom of my purse was a wrapped piece of lemon honey candy.  However, the wrapper was a little sticky from when this piece and its companion pieces had gotten too warm in my car, so I stuck it in a side pocket and resumed listening to the sermon.

Meanwhile, the poor lady beside me kept coughing.  Would she care if the wrapper were a little sticky, or would she just be grateful for the perfectly fine, clean candy inside?  Finally, I dug it back out of my purse and offered it to her with a whispered, “The wrapper’s a little sticky.”  She took it and thanked me after the service.  She was battling an allergy attack and the lemon-honey combination helped.  More than the candy, though, as this young couple seeks for their church home, maybe they’ll remember that someone from this church cared, even if the wrapper was a little sticky.

We are like that, too.  We look at ourselves and see only the slightly sticky, somewhat linty wrapper, therefore deciding that what we have isn’t good enough.  We never take into consideration the sweet, tasty, comfort-giving candy inside.  We tend to overlook the stuff on the inside – our gifts, talents, compassion, love and empathy – and instead mentally compete with others or ourselves, finally declaring, “I’m just not good enough.”

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POWER gets things done!

Image via Wikipedia

My husband and I attended a Mardi Gras party Friday night, and one of the instructions for the party was to wear a Mardi Gras color, and the hostess had listed what the colors mean:

Purple = Justice

Green = Faith

Gold = Power

Given that I wear purple and green sometimes for school and I’ve been feeling powerful over our money lately, I opted for a gold top.  Upon arriving at the party, I quickly noticed two things.  One, almost everyone there was wearing purple, and certainly almost all the ladies were, and two, only one other person besides me was wearing gold.

I was thinking back on the party yesterday, and it was fairly remarkable that most people were aligning themselves with justice, very few chose faith and even fewer were going with power.  But why not?  Right now, I’m feeling very powerful – powerful over our finances, which makes me feel powerful over our future.  It’s this feeling of power which makes me get things done.  It makes me budget, research, find stuff for our yard sale and so forth.

Think about it.  Without power, things don’t go.  If your car battery has died, then your car has no power and it’s not going to go anywhere.  If your electricity is turned off, then your home won’t have power, and you won’t get anything done, like cooking or washing the dishes.  Even if your own battery is low due to illness or lack of sleep, then you’re not getting much done, either.

We have power over those things which we can control.  It’s as simple as operating a TV remote.  The holder of the remote can control the TV; she has power over which channels to watch and the volume.  When we discovered how our money was controlling us – through debts, living paycheck-to-paycheck, etc. – then we felt powerless to change things.  For my control freak self, that was really frustrating!  Dave Ramsey (you knew I had to bring his name into this eventually) says that women have a place in their gut that gets irritated when they’re feeling insecure about money, and that was flaring for me for a couple of years.  That spot hasn’t been bugging me lately at all, and it feels good.

In what areas of your life do you feel most powerful?  In what areas do you feel least powerful?  What will you do to become powerful where you feel most powerless?

Day Trippin’

Image via Wikipedia

Some people wonder how in the world I have time to homeschool and run my business.  I’d like to jokingly say, “I don’t sleep,” but the reality is, I do have to sleep to perform at my best, and with a lovely Fall something-or-other taking up space inside my head (cold, sinus infection, whatever), sleep is mandatory.  What makes it slightly more difficult is, I perform at my very best in the mornings, between wake-up and 1:00 in the afternoon.  I don’t comfortably make soap at night very often, because I’m usually too tired to feel like I can handle the lye safely.

Yesterday presented one of those moments of, “How do I balance these?”  I had a meeting with Elissa, a lovely new private label customer whose salon – Salon E –  happens to be in Kinston, over an hour away.  In order to ensure I made the meeting in time, I gave us an hour-and-a-half to get there.  So, figure with the time it took me to get dressed and glammed, the drive time (with a rare cruise through the McDonald’s drive-thru), our meeting time and the return trip, our homeschool afternoon was toasted.

We breezed through the morning’s lessons, got dressed and hit the road.  As we drove farther and farther north, the weather got better and better, with bright sunlight breaking through the dense clouds.  We explored land we hadn’t seen before and once I got my daughter out of her book and encouraged her to look out the window, she saw things she’d never seen before, such as fields of cotton.  She asked if cotton candy was made by adding sugar and color to cotton.  I told her what we use cotton for, things such as clothes, q-tips and cotton balls.

After an hour-long meeting, Elissa and I settled her order and the girls and I headed home.  We had another nice drive, enjoying the sights, including a house in Pink Hill that was totally decked out for Halloween.  I showed the girls the rest of the sights on NC 11, then we came home and I planned my next soaps.  Now just to have a few hours in a morning and a clean kitchen.  That would be bliss!