Are You a Noun or a Verb?

I don't know if anyone else is having trouble capturing the Christmas/Holiday frame of mind this year but for some reason it seems to have escaped me this year.  It just doesn't feel like Christmas for some reason.

I have been making a few ornaments but other than that I have done nothing about the whole thing.  I still haven't put up my tree.  I haven't made a single gift.  I have been watching Christmas movies and doing all the usual things but it just escapes me for some reason.  The whole thing feels artificial, and forced. The more commercials I see that promote retail Nirvana as some kind of requirement to a happy holiday, the more I'd like to ignore the whole thing!  I wonder, does anyone else feel it too?

I used to jump into the whole holiday thing with both feet.  I am the person who started making my gifts in January every year. I baked tons of fancy goodies, made pounds of hand dipped chocolates, and mailed countless jars of jam and bars of homemade soap.  Yet this year, I have no desire to do any of it.  I know I will gear up and get some of it done and I will have gifts finished for the kids and be ready for Christmas dinner.  But it will all be about honoring our traditions.  I keep thinking - it shouldn't be about black Friday, or cyber Monday or acquiring more stuff.  Why do we give gifts to each other anyway?  Because we are supposed to?  The more I thought about this dilemma, the more I looked to spirit for the answers.  If we are giving a gift out of obligation, then it really isn't a gift.  What is a gift anyway?

Well that depends on if you define it as a verb or a noun.  If it is love in action, then you are giving an endowment.  A gift that honors the receiver not with just another object of desire but with a physical manifestation of being endowed with your loving energy.  If that is the case, the obligatory trinket from the big box super store just doesn't cut it, does it?  However, if you look at it as a noun, it's just something given freely without compensation.  Puts a different spin on it doesn't it?  So the question is, are you a noun or a verb?  Hmmmm.....  An endowment or given without compensation?

Now the children in my life, they don't know how to give without it being a verb.  What they give is honesty.  Simplicity. And if I am lucky, a whole heap of unmitigated joy!  Something most of us forget about the age of 13 or so when we begin to care more about what other people think of us than what we think of ourselves. 

So what do I want for Christmas this year?

I want some of that!!! 
Money can't buy it.
Only being a Verb will nurture it.  It's never out of style, it always fits and it grows....