Who's in charge of celebrations? I am. And so are you.

With this post, I'm "celebrating" the fifth week in a row of posting once-per-week to my blog.  It's a minor celebration. 

Recently, I wrote about traditions and holidays in my post "Happy Groundhog Day! But I didn't make a special dessert."  It was a light-hearted reflection on celebrating and keeping traditions, or not, in our own ways.  It made me think of the picture book I'm In Charge of Celebrations by Byrd Baylor.  In the book, the narrator tells of her various celebrations based on the natural beauty and seasons of the desert where she lives.  There are Dust Devil Day, Green Cloud Day and Coyote Day, for example. 

From the book:

Last year I gave myself one hundred and eight celebrations - besides the ones that they close school for.  I cannot get by with only a few.  Friend, I'll tell you how it works.  I keep a notebook and I write the date and then I write about the celebration.

You can tell what's worth a celebration because your heart will POUND and you'll feel like you're standing on top of a mountain and you'll catch your breath like you were breathing some new kind of air.

When my kids were little, we used to sometimes look for these kinds of celebrations.  We didn't write them down or remember them each year.  But we enjoyed acknowledging celebrations such as Jump-in-Rain-Puddles Day. 

February is a smorgasbord of minor holidays - Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day.  Valentine's Day is the most blatantly commercial of these, although Presidents' Day has become the reason for all sorts of special sales as you can see from the ads and commercials.  Somehow, I don't think George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would approve of the consumerism.  Many holidays have become agents of consumerism and unrealistic or unmet expectations.  Valentine's Day, I'm looking at you.  A liturgical feast day, which originated in medieval times, morphed into the cultural and commercial holiday we have today.  It's fairly arbitrary.  So celebrate it if you want.  Or not.  And you don't even have to acknowledge it on social media.  It will be okay.   

Remember to put yourself in charge of celebrations.  And definitely make up some of your own!  

still, holiday crafts can be very fun...