Embracing Love & Light for Christmas

Hello and happy holidays to anyone who happens to read this post!
Have not posted in several months, as we have been busy with a variety of exciting projects!
 As Christmas approaches, have been reflecting about the idea of truly embracing love and light for Christmas this year.
That might seem obvious to some of you to embrace love and light at Christmas.
For many people, Christmas is a such a happy time spent with family and friends celebrating the birth of Christ, exchanging gifts, having great meals, and enjoying the wondrous holiday season.
While it still is all of these things for our family, for the last seven years, Christmas has been bittersweet, as there is a bit of an underlying sadness...a pain like no other...memories of a time when we lost our little precious baby daughter via miscarriage.
This year, I have had some blue moments thinking of what our lives would be like now if we had our little girl who would be turning seven prepping to see Santa and helping to make cookies, but that was not meant to be.
Instead of getting stuck in feeling down about the loss of our precious one, I have decided to really focus on embracing the LOVE that surrounds our family...the love that radiates from my dear hubby and from my sweet sons, as well as from friends and extended family.
We are truly blessed! 
Every year, we honor her memory by placing an angel ornament that has a memorial on the reverse side of it. We say a prayer for our baby girl as we place her angel on the tree.
I have read all kinds of inspirational ideas of honoring those whom we dearly miss at Christmas and two of the ideas that really seem to speak to our family (in addition to the angel ornament we created in her honor) are the ideas of creating a Happiness Jar and A Remembrance through Giving Envelope.
Our family enjoys working on a variety of philanthropic endeavors and charitable projects, but we have never created a Remembrance through Giving Envelope.
From what we have read, the idea is to write what we do as a family and then place the card into an envelope onto our Christmas tree in memory of our dear Bryn Elizabeth.
That is what we are going to do this year and hopefully, it will help us to embrace love and light for Christmas.
We are also going to create our own Happiness Jars.
We are starting them tomorrow and will add to them throughout the year and then, we will read what we have added next Christmas of 2016.
A whole year of happiness to review! Yay!
It feels great to give from the heart...to help others in a variety of ways...but what is amazing is that in giving, you receive so much love and feel so light so that there is even more room in your heart for joy and happiness!
Jesus is the reason for the season and he is the Light of the world, so preparing our hearts for His birthday celebration eases the pain of our loss.
If you are reading this and have lost someone dear to you, maybe you will want to try creating a Remembrance through Giving Envelope and a Happiness Jar for you and your family too.
Hope that you will feel a warm hug of love and light and that you will enjoy this Christmas season to the fullest!
If you need some thoughts and prayers to get you through the holidays, please feel free to leave a comment and we will pray for you!
Best wishes to everyone celebrating their special holidays at this time and a very Merry Christmas to all who celebrate Christmas like our family does!