For Them, Gold

December 2, 2021

When my daughter Ella was 4, she went through a Glitter Phase. Glitter was everywhere: in the carpet, in the car, in her hair. It's so pretty, she said. See how the couch sparkles? It's like magic. 

It did not make ME happy to see glitter everywhere. I did not think it was magic. But boy, was it ever Ella's bliss! I saw my choices as: A) Take away the glitter until she could learn not to make a mess (good luck with that!); or B) Not let her go on to the next thing until she'd cleaned up; or C) Teach her that her needs should be tempered by the needs of everyone else sharing the space; or D) Enjoy her enjoyment, and quietly clean it up myself when it got to be too much.

I opted for D. See, your bliss is what makes you YOU, and when you stomp on someone's bliss, even by mistake, it's stomping on a part of them. Glitter was Ella's joy at the time. It wasn't hurting anyone, it was just inconvenient. It took a little while to reframe my thinking so that instead of seeing glitter, I saw Ella... but doing that made life better for everyone.

It seems to me that about 50% of the population has a Glitter Phase each year, starting in mid-October and peaking on the 25th of December. To be honest, I fall pretty firmly in the other 50%; that's probably because here at KidsOutAndAbout we're helping organizations all year long as they plan their PR and marketing campaigns for the holiday season; by the time it actually arrives, it feels anticlimactic at best.

Fortunately, I have colleagues whose holiday spirit remains undiminished year after year: It's their bliss. They meet the arrival of the first snowflakes with joy rather than groans. They had the office decorated by mid-November. They wear reindeer headbands. I just have to look left and right and up and down these days, and everywhere, EVERYWHERE, what I see is... glitter.

And it's pure gold.

—Deb