The Top 5 Favorite American Holidays

So, you are walking down the street (singin’ do-wah diddy-diddy down diddy-do)…

No, you aren’t singing, but as soon as I wrote that line of thought of the old song by The Moffatts and
couldn’t resist typing. Now the song is echoing in my mind while I’m writing…

SO, pretend you are walking down the street and you are stopped by a foreigner visiting America for the first time.
They ask you a simple question, “What are the top 5 favorite American holidays”.

What would your answer be?

Depends on how you define favorite. The retail industry reports the Best and Most Popular Holidays According to Spending Sprees.
I was a little surprised to find the list I found. Of course, it was based upon the fact that “favorite” was graded by how much money is spent on the holiday.

The list included: Halloween, Easter, Mother & Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and then “Black Friday” (although I would not categorize that day as a Holiday).

According to the every popular “Harris Polls” (which I think is what some game show questions are based upon?)
Their list was a little more my style. Interesting side note on this list if you go read the article, is that the online poll was conducted 9/12 through 9/19 2011. 9/11 induced many thought provoking ideas throughout the following weeks. Ok, I digressed. Back on point…

Favorite Holidays ranked in the order the data collected:
Christmas
Thanksgiving
Halloween
4th of July
Easter
New Year’s Eve
Memorial Day
Labor Day
My Birthday
Valentine’s Day / Hannukah (tied at #10)

So, where does all this take you as an empty nest mom trying to survive now that your fledglings have taken flight?
The list of data was gathered by facts, questions and analysis.

If you are an empty nest mom now and feeling afraid, useless, and with no direction then it’s time for you to do some fact gathering yourself.

You have two options now.

Option 1 is you can do like some empty nest moms and cry, mope, get depressed and make this new phase of life the most miserable of your life by staying stuck in this mode for way far too long.

Option 2 is you can decide to have your good cry and ruin your make-up. Then, you can take definitive action and choose to map out a plan to use this time as a chance to re-define your life.

Option 2 begins with taking some time to sit and really think about this open path before you. What do you want to do with your life now? It begins with taking analysis of what is important to you NOW. What are your values NOW? I can absolutely promise you that some of your core values may have shifted over the years. What used to be priority #1, may have fallen to the bottom of the list, but now may be the time to move it up higher in order to live a more fulfilled life.

What do I mean?

For me, when I went through this exercise, I knew that “Creativity” was important to me. Through the years I have used various methods for my creative outlet (learned to paint, do various crafts, learned to crochet, learned to knit, tried beading) but my first love of creativity is the written word. The Value List I worked through helped me to realize that for the past three years, I had not really nourished my core value of Creativity.

As we all know, in order to thrive we have to have nourishment. And my creativity value had shriveled. Except for a some sporadic blog postings I had been so busy with the job and work that I was coming home tired, and not doing anything creative. A part of me was shriveling and I wasn’t even aware of it. Once I became aware, I then had a thirst and desire to nourish that part of me that was still precious and important to my value system.

That was when I decided to work on a children’s fiction book – fueling my creativity need with my first love of the written word. I also decided to explore my interest in photography. More recently, researching more about Empty Nest Syndrome in order to try to help other women find a path to new purpose!

If you haven’t re-evaluated your core values lately, I encourage you to take a few days to work through them.

I promise you that you will start finding some hope in your Empty Nest!

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