A Facebook memory popped up today with a picture taken eight years ago that got me thinking.
In it, two freshly-made chocolate martinis with their chocolate-rimmed glasses are neatly placed on Christmas napkins atop our pub table.
The scene was lit only by the soft glow of white Christmas lights strung around the perimeter of the room we have always referred to as the back kitchen.
We call it that based on the technicality that it has some appliances often found in a kitchen, but the unassuming room has been so much more than that to us.
For us, the dinky little space in the basement of our 1968 bilevel has been a craft room, a storage room, and a school room (at least in my mind when we mulled homeschooling a decade before we finally pulled the trigger).
It’s been a kitchen both times we had an aging parent move in, and it was our godsend when a water leak had us waiting months for our real kitchen to get fixed and renovated.
Our house is not what I would call my dream home, and yet the way we’ve been able to repurpose parts of it for each chapter of our lives makes it the only place in the world for us.
This house belongs to us, and we belong to it.
So much ink has been spilled about the true meaning of Christmas and the importance of gratitude in a season of consumerism probably because there’s no shortage of people (including me) who need to hear it.
Perhaps all of us can find some nugget of gold — whether it be a room in the house, a talent, or a relationship — that has been renewed and returned to us over and over.
Chances are your greatest treasures are already in your possession, and maybe it just takes a new opportunity or point of view to discover them all over again.
Enjoy your Christmas treasure hunt.