The holidays are solidly upon us and they can bring up so many emotions. There is the excitement of children celebrating the season with music, cookies, decorations, gifts, seeing extended family, and no school! Adults can and do feel all these things too, but the holidays tend to be more complex. Besides the hopes for a good season, there’s also anxiety, loneliness, stress, and disappointment.

I cope with these feelings by trying to find the good in people and searching for time in community to help me through the new year and the dark and cold winter. As challenging as the winter holidays can be, it’s also the time of year that can be a great time to find community to help with these rough times.

 

WES just had such a great community builder on December 10th with the Winter Festival. We sang, danced and laughed together through the show and then we ate cookies, talked together, and caroled afterwards.

 

Most times there isn’t a lot of time we are all together in such a way where everyone can be in community. We are always coming and going with our busy daily lives. When you add in children, the ability to find time diminishes. So, the staff at WES started brainstorming. How can we help our members find more time to be together, especially our families with young children who have childcare needs? More events!

 

This December 31st, WES will hold its first annual New Year’s Eve party for children. This plan brings our children (and any adults who want to take part) together at WES  to have fun dancing, playing games, and ringing in the New Year hourly all evening.

 

While the children are entertained and safe, our parents have time to spend time with other adults within or outside our WES community. To make it easier to make plans with WES members for New Year’s Eve, I am collecting names of anyone and everyone who is looking to be linked together with other members/WES friends. Several people have already expressed a desire for such connection, so there is a demand! Email me by December 24th so you all can get busy making community building plans!  

 

This sounds like a win-win to me. Kids have fun, adults have fun. Yay!

You can find a more detailed description of the party here and you can also find it as an insert in our Sunday program.  Parents, you can find the registration form here.

 

Warmly,

Melissa Sinclair, Director of Lifelong Learning