her able hands

Itching to gift a loved one with something homemade but feeling overwhelmed by the time constraints at the holidays? Are you a Last Minute Lucy like I am? Bath salts are easy. Super easy and fun to make. Don’t believe me? Go check out Angelina’s terrific tutorial on WhipUp.

Twelve years ago I made bath salts for my friends and family at the holidays. I designed a snazzy logo and called my fledgling effort Sacred Spiral. The labels had a kokopelli and a spiral and I printed them on earthy paper with lots of fleck. I used the book The Complete Book of Essential Oils and Aromatherapy: Over 600 Natural, Non-Toxic and Fragrant Recipes to Create Health - Beauty - a Safe Home Environment and sat up late nights listening to Indigo Girls and Jane Siberry. I had little pipettes and tiny jars of pure essential oils in scents that frightened me at first sniff—vetiver anyone? Phew. But as I blended the drops using Valerie’s recipes with specific results in mind, the fragrances became heavenly.

I’m not making anything for the holidays this year (except for Pizelles and maybe some cut out sugar cookies with the lingonberry preserves I picked up somewhere last year with that in mind. But I’m not throwing a huge, commercial Christmas this year either. Sure, I’ll end up making one trip to Target for a few things and will likely place an Amazon order next week, but I’ve already done the bulk of my shopping at Etsy and every day this week I’ve pulled small padded envelopes from my mailbox all bundled together with rubber bands. Can I tell you how happy these small packages have made me? Each one I’ve opened to find something handmade that I have picked out for someone I care about and a handwritten note thanking me for my order, a business card or two, and even some freebies—stickers, recipe cards, note cards, bookmarks. So, so delightful. No price tags to rub off with nail polish remover. No credit card balance racking up because I used the money in my PayPal account that has accrued over the last year, from advertising on this site. I’m very pleased to be circulating the money this way in the blogosphere.

I had the epiphany while traveling east for Thanksgiving, sailing past farms and rivers and wide vistas with mountains rolling out from beneath our wheels into the distance.

The world felt so quiet with the kids dozing in the back, Chris’ warm hand wrapped around mine until I slipped out of his finger tangle to snap another picture. I thought about the holidays and the madness and the pressure that I always feel. About the fact that the words I hate Christmas have come out of my mouth so many times in recent years and why. How the words simplify and balance, while ringing with the tone of truth, also make me cringe because they seem so unattainable anymore. As I thought these thinky thoughts, Chris slid into the passing lane and pulled out ahead of the answer.

Why not give a rousing f*ck you to the Big Box? But how? I don’t have the time or energy to make things this year. I just don’t. Images from browsing the blog world rose in my mind’s eye and I thought of all of the talented bloggers out there who create and sell so many different things that are both useful and inspirational. Which made me think of Etsy. And Christmas didn’t seem so awful all of a sudden. Still a little bit awful, but a little less so.

It feels daring to say no to big ticket holidays. Not that we have huge ticket holidays, but we all tend to rack up a little more debt than we should every December. I don’t want that anymore. Doing that makes all of our goals move that much farther away, and I realized as I burned up the miles of asphalt between here and there that what I want more than anything in the world for Christmas this year is for each and every one of the people I love to feel easy in their lives. To not feel worried about money because money worry eats us alive and puts a grimy pallor over everything else. I want to find ways to support those people reaching their life goals and somehow big Christmas shopping lists is tangled up with it all, leading us all astray from our goals.

Here’s an example: one simple goal of mine is to have a week with my family in the mountains or at the beach. One week. But we always spend that money at Christmas instead. Hmmm.

And there they were, those mountains of my dreams, the Catskills almost within reach. This close to waking in the morning to mist rolling through the valleys, steam from my coffee cup rising to warm my face, breath coming easy and moving deep. But we waved to them in the far distance north of the Hudson Valley as we sped through on our way to my family—where I most needed to be and was so grateful to arrive.

So no bath salts for Christmas unless I buy some from Angelina, which I just may. But I’m thinking sometime in February, I’ll pick up some Dead Sea salts and Epsom salts. Pull out my bin of essential oils and my little baggie of pipettes. Pop in Easy Tiger and lose myself in the scents and sounds. Then draw a bath because I’m going to try nurturing myself a little more in 2008.

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