Penny Freeman, Copyright 2022
Projecting hope for the holidays is meant to “get us through” this dark season, and yet for most of us the bar is set high with expectations instead of hope. This sets us up for a frenzy of meeting expectations and then crashing afterwards. We long for a feast that invites us to feel full but not stuffed–to enter a house feeling the welcome of belonging. We hope for laughter, warmth, joy and delicious food–that IS what commercials are selling as “hope” during the televised breaks of parades and football games, after all; and yet hope mishandled leads to burdening expectations that will inevitably let us down…