The holiday season is upon on us, and if retailers and the media are to be believed we need to go and show our love for our friends and family by buying them tons of stuff! And also buying stuff for ourselves, because surely we don’t have enough!

But I live in a house full of stuff. Too much stuff, in fact, that I can’t figure out where to put it…stuff to give away, stuff to use, stuff that I want to hang onto “just in case”…I don’t need more stuff. And I realized the other day I’m in a (I guess!) “lucky” situation in that I don’t have to buy stuff for anybody else either! I mean, sure, I’d like to get some gifts for my parents and boyfriend just because I don’t want them to think I don’t care, but I don’t have a long list of people I “need” to buy for, because the people I spend time with and care the most about don’t care about stuff either. Or we DO but we buy what we need when we need it, or when we can afford it, and manage to do without the rest. It’s kind of nice, and refreshing, and makes me feel good. I won’t deny that I love a random surprise gift, to know that somebody thought of me (I love gifts from students!) but it isn’t that important. Or maybe we are all in the same boat? I doubt it, because I don’t care about the new iPhone, or getting a new car, or what brand of anything I’m wearing or carrying, or really what people think of me if most of my wardrobe is cheap clothes from Target, and my impression is certainly that a whole lot of people care about those things!

But I digress.

The holiday season is a busy time. Especially for we musicians, who tend to work our butts off providing all kinds of holiday cheer for you fine people. You’re welcome. It’s fun though. I don’t want a Christmas without cheesy Christmas music, do you? (Don’t answer that.) This season for me is dedicated to the show I’m doing on electric violin—we were, in fact, on TV Friday morning. There’s video, and here’s the link. Check it out! Don’t laugh 😉

I think, for a classically trained Suzuki kid who really can’t dance, I do pretty okay rocking out, playing by ear, by memory, and with others. I don’t know what the next step with my electric violin will be, if anything, but it’s been an adventure. A tiring adventure to be sure, but it’s been different.

Sometimes I get crabby. I know last week I put up a few posts that made people think I was feeling down. I don’t know—maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. A friend in the band suggested that we need to take what makes us happy and focus on that, to “find your joy” in your life and daily activities.

Today my joy is a bunch of things. Watching my cat play with a stuffed shrimp toy (omg, this sort of thing truly cracks me up!). Going for a run in the fairly mild weather we’re having. Wearing a bright red sweater. Texting with Leslie. Trying to decide what adorable thing to buy my niece for Christmas (not out of obligation but because I want to!) Planning some Christmas baking (cinnamon rolls, shortbread cookies). Looking forward to cuddling on the couch later and watching Dr Who (I have become absolutely obsessed with the show…). It’s easy to get overwhelmed with life and focus on negative things (student loans! tiny retirement accounts! too much junk/the house is dirty! too busy!) and harder to focus on positive things, but it’s important to keep working on my mindset.

In the meantime, here are some photos that my friend April took at our performance on Friday night. It was a fun show! And as a side note, I think it’s okay to be crabby occasionally 🙂

This is one of those weeks where I look at the calendar and think I must be crazy. April and I are throwing a “cookie exchange party” Friday and I’m planning my part of it. That includes baking cookies at some point, though I have a good recipe picked out! And making a cheese ball, and something else too probably. My quartet is playing for a composition class tomorrow, I’m getting my CD’s on Wednesday from Jen (woo hoo!) and the band has three shows this week. There’s only about two more weeks of teaching though (really, two weeks and part of a day) though those are five day weeks. Louie finishes up in two weeks too, and we’ve both been really busy and stressed out, and I’m SO looking forward to him being done with the semester so he can relax too.

One last thing, in this random post of everything…really a brain dump I guess…does anybody have any good book recommendations? I’m in the middle of a few non fiction right now but would love to find a great fiction book (or series.) Nothing too sci-fi or dystopian please.