Praise For the Women

      Have you decorated your house yet?  Or are you still looking at all the boxes stacked up waiting for you to have time to trim the tree?  Worse yet, are you still waiting for someone to bring down all the Christmas decorations from the attic?  Well, it's that time of year...
    We have so many jobs to do, not to mention the purchasing of gifts for everyone from the newspaper carrier to your boss at work.  The cookie baking, pie baking, Christmas cards to address, after you write the annual holiday letter.  Sheesh!  Who has the time?  If you are a woman, the load grows heavier with each passing day.  It seems like everyone wants a piece of you.  I can only imagine my pastor's wife and how she must feel.  Besides all the additional duties she must accomplish at the church, what about her personal life situation?   There is always someone with a more crushing load than us, isn't there?
      I love to give advice.  Actually, at one time I wanted to be the next Dear Abby!  Yet I don't have a decent bit of wisdom to share regarding how to sail through the holidays with peace and sanity.  Learning to say no might help when your child's teacher asks you to bake cookies.  But then you'd feel like a jerk for saying no.  So you'd do it, adding an additional four dozen cookies to what you had already planned to bake.  Hey, what's four dozen more?  Sure, you can always address all those Christmas cards later after the kids go to bed, and after you wash the kitchen floor with all the cookie flour spread around like snow.  Oh, but first, put in a load of laundry.  No big deal...
       Women deserve a rowdy, loud round of applause, with a few whoops and hollers.  What they must accomplish is mind boggling.  Talk about multitasking!  Women do it best!  I'm not complaining, not me.  I don't have all of those duties many women have to do.  I can sail through the holiday with peace and sanity.  But I recognize and appreciate that others really do have a more crushing load than I.  So I will deliver my own whoops, hollers and applause to those women.  And I'll pray for their sanity.  And peaceful heart.  I'll also pray that some sweet person will recognize the stress and fix her a cup of hot chocolate as she attends to the decorating, card addressing, gift wrapping, cookie baking...
       But ladies, really, please try to eek out a few minutes to enjoy the season.  Find time, somehow, to sit quietly viewing your newly decorated tree and the stack of addressed envelopes; smelling the delightful scents emanating from the kitchen; and sipping the hot cocoa as you reminisce about Christmases gone by.  YOU deserve some peace and blissful whimsy.  Yes, you!  Now, quit reading and go enjoy yourself!
                                                            MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

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