Farewell to the Box of Shoulds

This week we finally put our tree up and it was so exciting to see how our three children really dove into it this year.
At the same time, I had to do a little bit of inner work to really release the outcome and allow it to flow.

You see, I have this box of Christmas decorations which we’ve been lumbering around with us for the past 15 years.
They’ve been carefully gathered and collected over our family’s childhood. Many of them were bought in the UK from when we lived over there when our girls were small.
There are the few things that were gifted to us during a particularly broke time.
There’s even a small angel decoration that I made for my husband’s and my first Christmas together. (We were “in-between” countries, not knowing where to settle so not really wanting to buy a lot of things. We had a small apartment and at the last moment I decided we needed to decorate for Christmas after all. The little angel’s face was done with embroidery thread and her body was ribbon found in the bottom of a sewing basket. Her head was literally the blower of a bubble bottle, covered in material. Every year I hang her on the tree with fondness.)
Over the years our box of decorations has been bashed around as it traveled from place to place with us.
Not only that, many a time I’ve stressed about its wellbeing, begging my husband to do check ins on its care. There was the couple of Christmases it had been left in storage and I would mourn the little angel or special trinkets that wouldn’t be on the tree that year. 
There’s even been late night panic attacks where I’ve planned fire escapes and wondered how to get that box of decorations out from wherever it was stored.
At a certain point I’ve had to ask the magic question of “why?”
Why? Why was a box of decorations so important?

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