Faster than the Circus
On Keeping the Holiday Spirit
It feels like a sigh, a time to actually enjoy the season.
Now that the day of Christmas has come and gone, I feel like I can actually enjoy the season. I am happy to bask in the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve because any sort of major push is over - and what a push it was. That’s not a complaint, just a statement of fact - it was a big push to get through the holiday season. I’ll also look for any excuse to take an extended holiday season; I don’t like how quickly that holiday spirit leaves us and I hope to hold onto it all year long.
American journalist Kin Hubbard once said, “Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out any quicker than the Christmas spirit.” We could identify that Christmas Spirit as a sense of charity, goodwill, and brotherly love, but it’s a magic with a power far greater than we rightly know. The Christmas Spirit gives us cause to slow down if we have the opportunity and appreciate those we have in our lives. We’re all so busy in our lives. We’re all so busy trying to figure out which monkey are actually part of our circuses.
Christmas carries a lot of baggage, even for those who love celebrating the holiday. Some may point at the excessive parts of consumerism and materialism and all the pressures and problems that can accompany gift-giving. We can feel pressured, finding ourselves more stressed than enjoying the holiday, and I don’t think that’s the point of Christmas or the holidays in general.
I am a fan of Christmas and, truly, most of the holidays. This year, I realized how busy I am in these “ber” months of September through December, which I love so much. Now that the holiday of Christmas is behind us, and we have some of that magical energy still lingering, I wanted to recount how I spent my solstice week and the big day-long ceremony that we conducted over the course of December 21st, that day-long ceremony of the Mistletoe Market and the “Evening of Holiday Spirit” at the day’s end. We created a lot of magic that day.
Let’s try to keep the Christmas Spirit in town longer than the circus, shall we?
With that said, sometimes holiday spirit can win out against practicality. We almost didn’t host the Mistletoe Market this year. In years past, Isaac (my husband, the other half of Deep Earth Arts) managed the rental, the vendors, the entertainment, and the marketing. This year, being in school for massage therapy, he indicated he didn’t have the energy to manage it.
I couldn’t see it not happening, so I took over the reins.
For those who aren’t local to the Littleton, NH area or just didn’t have a chance to make it, we’ve hosted the “Mistletoe Market” for the past few years in the Littleton Opera House. It’s the indoor version of our summer “Goblin Markets,” and we describe them as witchy farmers markets. The Mistletoe Market is that, but indoors during the Winter Solstice season.
From the beginning, we wanted to make the event a big deal. Our version of “big” is bringing in small birch trees, putting them in Christmas tree holders, and filling those holders with sand to weigh them down. Those are interspersed around the vendor tables that make up the barebones of the market in the Main Hall of the Opera House. Then, we drape white holiday lights from tree to tree.
This year’s market included Middle Eastern dancing from Magdalene Miller, Christmas music from Ashley Warwick, and guitarist Paul Bougelais. The hall was filled with vendors and artists, with Ramona Nault of Aura Insights Aura Photography in the green room, and we had other Tarot & Oracle card readers in the Tower Room upstairs.
As market manager this year, I opened up the space at the Opera House at 8 am and got vendors to their specific tables. When we host markets, we ask vendors and table renters to set up at least an hour before the market starts. Our Mistletoe Market this year had a start time of 11 am, so 8 am to 11 am was a wonderful dance of getting people into the parking lot, then into the building, then to their table, and doing my best to keep the floor dry as people were in and out of the building.
Don’t get me wrong - I loved it! I knew what kind of day I would have in terms of steps, sweeping/mopping, and managing many people, so I knew how to prepare myself with the right amount of food and caffeine. I wasn’t only managing the market from 8 am on, but I was also going to have a gallery reading that evening in the same space. The market was over at 4 pm, and my gallery reading began at 6 pm. I was lucky enough to have friends who let me bow out around 3:30 to prepare.
I actually had last-minute gifts to get.
I had most of my gifts - the gifts intended for some of the guests in the audience of that evening’s gallery reading. As I’d been doing over the past year, I’ve been getting the nudge to get specific items for certain audience members days before an event. Remember loving that Christmas Spirit before? I was going to not only bring items for the audience members but I was also going to wrap them so they would open them.
I left the market at 3:30, with people in charge of breaking down the market and getting the chairs out for my event. I ran to the stores I needed to go to, found what I needed to get, then wrapped them and added them to the haul I’d already started with. I then took all the gifts and put them on the stage in the groups for each spirit who would be there.
I had no idea what to expect other than I was handing out gifts for the holidays. I began the event by introducing myself and how I found the path, then what had been happening to me with gifts for people in the audience. I had to take it one step further than my recent shows, where I just handed items to people. This time, because of the holidays, they would be wrapped.
And I couldn’t wait to hand them out!
For a few days leading up to the event, a woman’s father was with me, and he had me get three items for her: a Folger’s coffee container to represent the cans he kept his nuts and screws in. He also had me get a box of screws because this woman, his daughter, would have a door in her life she needed to fix. Then, the final item for her was a baseball cap - a black one - that I saw in Home Depot a few days before that. I knew his daughter would be there at the event, and she wouldn’t have anyone in her life to take care of these broken doors and would have to do it herself. He wanted her to wear that particular hat as a message from him so that when she had to do those projects herself, she could wear that hat and know he was with her.
As she tagged me in a Facebook post, I’ll include her picture and what she wrote to show you why these gifts were so touching.
“Went to a group reading of the spirits with Josh Simonds last night. Very interesting things came through to him about my Dad. First he asked if anyone had a father that kept lots of Folgers cans of nuts and bolts around the house. He also said there was something about a door not opening. Josh also asked if I was clumsy, and yes I definitely am. I chose to wear my favorite boots with very little tread and fell on the ice. 🤣 Next he said that he was worried about his daughter doing things on her own around the house or with fix it projects. He said that she should find joy in life by going somewhere like Foxwoods. My Dad was big on gambling and I am going on a cruise in January and they have a casino on board. My Dad kept hundreds of cans of nuts and bolts in his storage room and the door on his house shifted and the door casing was not lined up with the lock so I couldn’t get in the house to get Christmas decorations that I have stored over there. Josh got me a can of Folgers coffee🤣, a package of screws, and a baseball hat with Milwaukee on it, and my Dad did like his beer.😊My Dad wants me to wear that hat when I have things to do around the house to know that he will be there with me. I was so excited to have all this information presented to me….Thanks Josh, great evening of fun and laughs!”
Along with this father, I had a particular grandmother with me, who also knew her grandchild would be in the audience. She had a very particular way of identifying herself, and while doing what I do with these gifts requires a ton of faith, this one did. Her identifying symbol was very specific: the glass marbles of mancala, the board game. Luckily, our local bookstore carries them, and I had one to give away. Then, this grandmother would be known for her love of Beatrix Potter and crossword puzzles.
In Spirit, she was being pretty adamant about the crossword puzzles. The intensity of her message around those crossword puzzles indicated a certain level of stress around cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. I asked her grandson as he was unwrapping gifts if it was something she passed from, and he indicated it wasn’t, but it was undoubtedly an illness in his family. Everyone - including him and his family - would benefit from hearing how important it is to keep our minds active as we age.
After this particular grandmother, I had a funny situation with a certain set of mothers and grandmothers in spirit. The first indicator I had was a woman who started life with very little money but would have known abundance and comfort later in life. She would have liked instant mashed potatoes, and no matter how much money she had in her life, she would love her instant mashed potatoes.
I had her with me, and the same spirit wanted me to get those Vienna sausages in the cans, the small hotdog-type sausage. This woman had a man there she wanted to give these sausages to, and I was under the impression that when I found the granddaughter and made the connection about the mashed potatoes, the sausages would somehow fit as well. Everything connected with everyone up to this point, and this had to make sense.
It didn’t make sense to anyone.
I found someone with the instant mashed potatoes grandmother, but having someone alive she wanted to give sausages to made no sense. In trying to figure it all out, a man raised his hand when I asked about these sausages, saying he liked him and the woman fit the profile, but there was nothing specific about the mashed potatoes.
It didn’t make any sense, but it all felt weirdly connected.
Somehow, I ended up pulling both of them up to the front of the room, giving her the mashed potatoes, her friends the socks, and this man the Vienna sausages. Strangely, there were a lot of connections between them. They were both local, they both had men around them in Spirit who smelled like sawdust, and his mother and her grandmother felt very similar. They might have even known each other, but the two had a deeper connection.
The woman who received the instant mashed potatoes was angry. Spirit didn’t share why, but she had been let down in life by people who were supposed to lift her up, not let her down. She had some sort of righteous anger, and the man who received the Vienna sausages also had an anger problem. As guided by Spirit, they both had heart problems in their family, him already being aware of an aneurysm and trying to lead the opposite of an angry life.
They were both given messages about anger, but perhaps more importantly, the audience was.
I had one more gift-giving exchange to go through. I had a brother with me for a few days, who needed me to get his sister a small basketball hoop for her home office or wherever she’d be on the phone for too long. He also needed me to get a bottle of Hershey’s syrup for her, and the third and final gift was a Mattel Viewfinder, found secondhand at a local antique mall called the Purple Peacock.
All of these items were important to her - she and he had a basketball connection, she used to make her brother chocolate milk, and they used to play with the Viewfinder together. Even better, the boy on the back of her tiny office basketball set looked just like her brother when he was twelve and playing basketball.
I thought she was going to be the last gift recipient of the evening, but I was wrong. Before the event, I was going through the local Coop and walked by a bunch of roses, knowing that I had to get them. It was going to be someone’s mother’s birthday or anniversary. I had to end the evening with that gift recipient, bringing everyone a different perspective as to why it’s so important to take care of oneself.
When we take care of ourselves, we’re reducing our suffering. When we reduce our suffering, we reduce the suffering of those aware of it - whether in the world of Spirit or Life with us here. When we cultivate our peace, we cultivate the peace of those who love us. That’s why I believe that if the holidays are a source of stress, they’re being done wrong.
Giving ourselves peace is the greatest gift we can give our loved ones.
With the actual day of Christmas behind us but 2025 not yet upon us, we can gather up this Christmas Spirit and bottle it up however we can. Listen to the music a little longer if that’s your thing. Enjoy a couple of extra days of desserts. Go for a drive through the neighborhood before people start pulling their lights down. It’s the season of Vitamin Joy, and we need all we can get in the coldest, darkest part of the year.
Like a battery, let’s store it up, however we can.