I admit, I have gotten no small amount of pleasure out of the little, incremental “wins” of saving 20% here and there, or watching $10 or $20 cash back on purchases stack up into a decent little pot of cash.

And this experience perfectly illustrated how sometimes taking a few minutes of effort to set yourself up for a reward can be SO worthwhile.

This year, big wins may have felt hard to come by. But there are still little wins to be had, and they totally count – it just may take a few minutes, some effort to get started, and the willingness to slow down and step outside your usual way of doing things.

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How you feel about your holiday experience will absolutely affect the way your family feels about it. (Go ahead, ask a therapist.)
But Mom finding joy in the holiday isn’t just better for our kids, but it’s also better for US – and that’s reason enough.

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Whenever I watch old movies and read books set in bygone eras, I’m struck by how late they shopped, how they’d wait until Christmas Eve to trim the tree. If even Donna Reed’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life” – the quintessential mom and housewife – didn’t drag out her Rubbermaid bin of ornaments until December 24, should we really hold ourselves to a higher standard?

My point: despite what Instagram would have us believe, there’s no such thing as “too late”. No matter when you start, it counts.

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Depending on your spiritual beliefs, a ‘miracle’ may mean very different things to you. Divine intervention, a manifestation of energy, or simply happy coincidences; no matter your take on how they happen, I think we can all agree that they happen – right?

And what I’m struck with is how often the right thing happens just when you need it most, and how they sometimes cluster together, as though purposefully set there to get your attention.

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It takes time to learn how to do things, and it takes even more time to learn how to do them WELL. (And if you involve your kids in making things, your finished projects will likely never be magazine-page perfect.) But isn’t that what makes them charming, heartfelt, and totally unique? Imperfect as it may be, that first – or fifteenth – messy attempt is worth giving as a gift, hanging up, or displaying in the middle of the table.

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Free spirits don’t always love being fenced in, but nothing feels better to an big-picture thinker than actually pulling off an ambitious dream. So give yourself the gift of a solid, workable plan that will make it possible to knock at least one of those optimistic goals out of the park. Then sit back, pour a cup of celebratory cocoa, and follow that impromptu plan wherever it takes you.

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