Why Do We Celebrate?

I want to wish everyone in Canada and the USA

 a very happy and safe holiday celebration this week! 

I am going to the lake for two days of relaxing and then for Canada Day, this Wednesday, I will be at work from noon to 8 pm. We are having a little Canada Day party in the afternoon. Providing programs and celebrations at a personal care home is extremely challenging right now during this time of quarantine, social distancing, and so many other changes and worries. We are trying to gather people in very small groups, and then we try and position people with some distance between them.

Previously our Canada Day Parties at the personal care home have been huge outdoor events for residents and families complete with a hired musician, food, and decorations and lots of FUN. We always had a huge turnout. This year - What to do? We are setting up the patio and decorating in Red and White, but we are handling it like a mini “come and go” open house style event for the residents so that we only have a few people gathered at a time. It is a significant change and challenges our creativity.

This year our usual ways of celebrating have been so overwhelmingly disrupted.  We all want our social contacts to return to what it was before the pandemic, but in the meantime, we still want to share our lives with each other in some way. 

What I am impressed with is how resilient people have been. We are, indeed, finding new ways to celebrate and mark special events. My niece’s husband secretly contacted her Facebook friends and arranged for everyone to drive past and honk. He even surprised her by decorated their front yard.  She was thrilled with this new version of a birthday celebration.  I was pleased to discover that I could attend live-streamed service from my local church this past Easter from my own home.

We are communicating with others and having events on Skype, Zoom or Facetime. People from all over the world are participating in activities in new ways. Some times these changes have been very positive.

I love celebrations!

 I even love those days when unusual celebrations occur and sometimes I try and incorporate them into my home life and into my work life at the personal care home. Just to give one random example- Did you know that today, June 29th, is the International Day of the Tropics, which is sponsored by the United Nations? It is kind of the perfect day to buy a tropical plant, have a sweet beachy drink. Click to learn a bit about the fascinating biodiversity of the tropics. Why do we set up these differnt kinds of events and what is the point of it?

 

What do we celebrate?

We celebrate or commemorate the important markers of our lives. We celebrate our birthdays and commemorate the passing of loved ones. We remember anniversaries. There are special feelings of pride and acknowledgment of your capibilites on the day you get your driver’s licence on the day you graduate from school or when you get that longed-for job or be a winner in that major sports competition.

We celebrate the community acknowledgment of Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Mother’s Day, Fathers Day and many other days with big events or family gatherings.  We sometimes do a lot of consumer purchasing to get the right décor, clothing and treats and even cards to share. 

Each culture has its unique occasions and ways that they celebrate these days.  It might be hoisting a beer stein for Oktoberfest, or it might be watching a dragon dance for Chinese New Year.  These celebrations reflect the history, culture and beliefs and geography of a place and a people. It is a way that a group defines itself and binds itself together as a group. It is a way to remember the past traditions of their people and to teach its youth to be proud of their heritage and to continue it into the future.

These special days and moments are centred around universal human experiences. We all experience loss, sadness, fear, accomplishment, and we all look for love, peace, joy, and success. When we act to notice and mark these events and moments, we find meaning in what is happening to us. The sorrowful and the joyful can be shared and let us gain validation for what has happened and our feelings about it. As a group, we can offer each other solace in difficult times, and we can provide practical support too. We can even create a force for change by acknowledging the importance of what has happened.

Back to why do we celebrate?

We have fun and excitement, and we make special memories

What is life without a little joy and laughter? Human being’s health and well being are dependent on having a bit of fun and expressing ourselves.

We bond with others and become part of a broader community.

People need a community and a sense of culture and identity. We need to have the physical support of others, but we also need to have people to share in who we are and have things in common with us. 

We discover more about our own identity and learn what is important to us.

When you celebrate a rite of passage, it can change who you are and in a very real way how you see yourself.   My granddaughter just graduated from grade 6 this past week. She was a little kid and a member of her old school. When she returns to school next term, it will be a new school. It will no longer be the elementary school where she played during recess. It will be a junior high with new expectations, and there will be new social and extracurricular groups for her. Retirement is a big change too. We often describe ourselves by our jobs and our workplace. After you celebrate your retirement, you will redefine who you are and look at new possibilities.

It reflects our growth as people and our changing lives.

Our personal journey is marked by baby showers, births, baptisms, weddings, educational completion and all those other life events. Eventually, there will come the time of our death and commemoration of who we were and of our beliefs.  

Through our lives, we define what kind of person we are, we look at our roles in our communities and families, and where we belong and where we can make a difference. Our special days and events let us mark and confirm what these events mean to us as individuals and as a society.

Lets make this Summer's celebrations fun, thoughtful and meaningful despite the challenges we are facing in our world today.

Have a wonderful Canada Day and a fantastic Fourth of July.

Make some great memories!

Take Good Care of Yourselves

This is a time in our world where so many of us are feeling lost, helpless, and unsure about what we can or should do. We, as individuals, need to find a way to meet our own basic needs before we truly are able to give our best to help heal our society.
People need to take better care of themselves. The question is, how do we do that?

" I don't have time, I am not feeling great right now, I am too busy taking care of everyone else. I don't have the right supplies, I need to work, I need to just spend all my time on my computer or phone". 

The list of reasons used to put your own real needs last is enormous. Have you heard about the procedure of putting your oxygen mask on yourself first during an emergency so that you can help others? We need to do that in our daily life so that we can keep going ourselves and be there to help others be well. I'll be the first to admit that I have in the past and still continue to struggle with taking the time and focusing on what I need at the moment and then to follow through and meet those needs. 

Through my various health struggles, I have learned that you start with ONE step at a time and build on what you learn and accomplish. I want to try concentrating on one topic or idea a week and try and incorporate it into my life. I know that it can take a long time to truly master some goals. Still, I am sure that even small efforts with thinking, learning and implementing will lead to positive changes. Maybe something that I share will inspire you!

I'm hoping others will join me in this journey so watch for "Take Good Care of Yourself Sundays." See what changes I am making to hopefully increase my ability to cope in such a challenging time and to continue trying to lead a healthy life.

Recreation therapy and other disciples break up our activities and our therapeutic goals into several categories of health that are intended to create a holistic approach to health and wellness. I sometimes use these as labels for my blog posts, and I also want to use them as ways to organize the topics and ideas I plan to investigate and work on.

Physical 

Social

Emotional/ Mental Health

Cognitive/ Intellectual Health

Spiritual Health 

Sometimes also considered are  

Environmental Health 

Occupational Health

Financial Wellness

Do you have any particular challenges you are facing? Do you have favourite ideas for self-care? 

See you this Sunday for the first 

"Take Good Care of Yourself Sunday."

Remembrance Day

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Christmas Sheep

My workplace has a part time person responsible for spiritual care. Chaplains can be a part of the Recreation team or perhaps of a Spiritual Care Department, They leads ecumenical services, arrange for churches of different faiths to regularly send priests or ministers to lead services. They will counsel and visit with our residents and their families and be part of the team that provides palliative care and will do memorial services within our facility. The role of a Spiritual Care person in a Personal Care Home is very important and not enough facilities have someone trained for this task. It takes advanced learning and it also requires someone who is able to be respectful, support our residents in their emotional needs and be knowledgeable of a wide range of spiritual belief systems.

Our Chaplain did a more unique Christmas service this year. She did a service where she told the Christmas Story and mixed in related hymns as the story unfolded. She made a lot of props so that the residents could be directly included in the story. There was a group of the residents that wore garland halos and acted as our angels, there were little gold wrapped blocks for our group of Wise Men to hold and there were adorable little "knit with love" sheep for our Shepherd residents to cuddle. It was indeed a special and memorable way to tell the story of Christ's birth.

Christmas Eve Dinner

My Mother's family came from Poland and I grew up with a lot of Polish holiday and food customs.
I only recall having a full out Polish Christmas Eve dinner a couple of times growing up but it seemed magical to me and even as a young girl I appreciated that sense of a deep connection with ancient times and a rich sense of the Holy Night we were celebrating.

When our children were little Bob and I decided to have as much of a Polish traditional Christmas Eve dinner as we could arrange and we celebrated a morning breakfast with my father in Swedish fashion to honor his heritage. Christmas dinner was celebrated at Bob's parents on alternate years.

Christmas Eve dinner 2017

Polish Christmas Eve dinner is an elaborate affair called Wigilia. We really could not do a true, traditional celebration so we used a lot of creativity to make it our own. The dinner itself consists of 12 separate dishes, one for each month of the year but my Grandmother taught me that is was one dish for each of the Apostles. The dishes are supposed to be meat free but fish is allowed. The fish part is a problem for our family with seafood and fish allergies so we just ignore the main fish course and the herring and make it be any 12 meat free courses we can work out.

The evening meal starts with the children watching for the appearance of the first star of the sky. The star of Bethlehem guiding the wise men to Jesus. We then share the greeting Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia! We listen carefully because the ancient story is that the animals are able to talk on this night of the year as a reward for being there to welcome the baby Jesus at his birth. There should be straw or wheat at the table to make us remember the manger that Jesus was laid in. It was a very ancient belief that the grains needed to me brought in for the celebration of the winter solstice and that those grains would be the promise that the grain would grow again in the spring and the days would once again grow longer. Another important belief was that there should be an empty chair at the table. There is a saying that a guest in the home is God in the home. Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:40, 45) We leave a welcoming spot for a stranger or someone in need.  We also leave that spot to welcome the spirit of our deceased loved ones to be with us and in our minds and our hearts.

wheat berry, poppy seed and honey first course.

The meal itself has many meaningful elements to it.  The first dish is a kind of grain pudding called Kutia which has wheat grains to sustain us, honey to bring us sweetness of life and the poppy seed to bring us spice into our life. Next we serve Borscht which is a beet soup made with a vegetable broth and vegetables.  We have pierogis which we make with several fillings, cheese, sauerkraut and a fruit kind. We have a sauce made of mushrooms and onions we use on the perogies but really it could be a little thicker and served as a second soup or a little thicker as a mushroom stew.We have cheeses, pickles, breads, pickled beets, fried sauerkraut and sometimes a poppy seed cake.

There are songs to sing and gifts to open.   I try to head to Christmas Eve Mass which is called the Shepard's Mass. Midnight Mass is another option but sometimes it is better to get a good sleep and go to church in the morning. When I was a child we would have the big meatless dinner with my Polish uncle and aunt and other relatives and then I could open a package which was always pajamas. We went to Midnight Mass and then Jesus was born and it was Christmas Day! People would come back to our house even though it was one in the morning and my Mother would start all over again with putting out a meal. There was cold meat, breads, cabbage rolls and much more. The adults toasted the day and wished blessings and joy for the New Year. ... and even though I could now open the rest of my presents...  I usually fell asleep.

Wesołych Świąt i szczęśliwego Nowego Roku!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Lot of room for presents!

Nativity Sets and Angels

I hope you enjoy these pictures of the Nativity Set collection and other items that we have in our living room display case. They are quite a variety of styles and ages, each with their own treasured stories. I have taken them, plus others in my collection to the Personal Care home where I work. I used them for a discussion group and they sure do bring back memories of their own to our residents too.

My Grandma Lisowski's miniature plastic Nativity scene. Only 4 and a half inches by 3 inches

My Grandma Lisowski's Statues of the Holy Family

Sweet little Angels

Some of our Willow Tree Angels

This lovely little carved egg was a gift from my daughter. It has such  fantastic details of the Nativity within.

Bob's Grandmother Cooper and Aunt Irene were in Egypt when Bob was only 7.  His grandmother bought him the fur toy camel. Sadly Bob's Grandmother died in a car accident in Egypt on this trip and we are glad to have this mementoes of her.

The metal camel was a prized possession of Aunty Irene, that she gifted to him when she moved into a retirement home.

Our 3 pewter Wise Men were purchased on a Christmas to the Max convention trip to California a few years ago.

Jim Shore collectable called "Landscape Sleeps".

Cooking Latkes for Chanukah

This year the Hebrew holiday of Chanukah begin yesterday evening, December 12th and ends on December 20th.

We will also enjoy Latkes for dinner. They are potato pancakes and are traditionally made during the 8 days of the Hanukah season by most of my Jewish friends. These things are delicious! My Polish Grandma and my mom made potato pancakes fairly often. Mom usually prepared these on those colder winter days when you wanted sometime warm and filling but don't have time to cook for hours.

Chanukah is the Jewish eight-day, wintertime “festival of lights,” and the word itself means dedication. Menorahs, candle holders, are lit each evening, adding an additional candle each the eight nights and special prayers, songs and fried foods are shared together. A favorite game called Dreidel is played and sometimes gifts are exchanged.

The holiday commemorates an event in the second century BCE when a small group of Jews, led by Judah the Maccabee defended the old temple in Jerusalem during an invasion of the Holy Land. When the Maccabees and reclaimed the temple went to light the holy light in the temple they found only enough oil to last one day. Miraculously that tiny amount of oil lasted for 8 full days until new oil could be prepared.

The foods cooked are often deep fried in oil to commemorate the miracle of the oil lasting in the temple. Jelly donuts and the fried potato pancakes are favorites.

There is a lot of info about making Latkes on the internet and everyone seems to think the way their own Grandma made it is the right way and isn't that perfect? That is how traditions are handed down through the generations.

Latkes

Ingredients:
5 pounds of potatoes
2 eggs
1 onion
Approximately 3 tablespoons flour  or fine breadcrumbs or matzo meal
generous amount of oil - 1/2 to an inch deep in the pan
salt
pepper

To be served with:
apple sauce
sour cream
fancy parties can involve toppings that range from capers to caviar with a sprinkle of green onion.

Supplies you will need include:

bowls
potato peeler
grater
stirring spoons
frying pan
sieve
Paper towels
tea towels.

Directions:

• Peel and grate the potatoes. You can put it in water to keep it from browning but the starch from the potatoes helps with binding the pancakes together so I tend to just work fast.
• Put the grated potato into a sieve or a tea towel and try and force some of the potatoes  liquid out of  it but not to the point of it being really dry.
• Grate an onion and add to your potato.
• Next beat the eggs lightly and add to your mixture
• Add flour or matzo meal. Start lightly and add a bit more if needed. Too much flour can make it kind of gluey.
• Season lightly with salt and pepper . Remember you can always add more seasoning to taste later.
• Heat a vegetable oil in a pan, I like using an electric frying pan.
• Add a large spoon of your mixture to the oil. You should see small bubbles forming around your pancakes. It should not too thick so it cooks through. Flip and brown the other side.
• Remove the latkes from the oil and place on a paper towel lined plate to drain. 
• Keep warm and serve with choice of toppings. I think sour cream on top is perfect and my daughter requires applesauce.

The following videos can give you more information and let you see what the latkes should look like but really, this is simple homemade traditional food and we should not overthink it. We should enjoy it! The first is nice and quick intro. The second is Martha, always great products, always interesting but I would never work that hard to make a pancake.

The Nativity Scene

We have a display cabinet in our living room that we like to change seasonally. During December we set up our collection of Nativity sets in it plus some angels, snow men and other wintery items. I do like that the cabinet is lit from the top and it has glass shelves. This gives a nice shade and ambiance, but  perhaps not the sharpest for pictures.

My mother-in-law made beautiful ceramics as a hobby in her later years and produced many lovely, beautifully painted pieces but my favorite by far is this little nativity set that she displayed in the dining area of her kitchen. My kids remember it from grandmas and now my grandchildren get to see it too.

Grandma Cooper's Nativity Set

We Three Kings

Shepard's await in Fields by Night

Oh Come, O Come Emmanuel! 

The top two shelves of the cabinet.

I hope to share pictures of some of the other Nativity sets in the near future.

Let's Draw Recreation Therapy-- Video

I love this little video. It explains in under 3 minutes what I do at work!

One thing the video does not make clear is that we need to make the activities fit the needs of the individuals. My seniors would not be suited to doing a ropes course for a social activity but they do love singing along with an entertainer or having a discussion group and coffee party!

Therapeutic Recreation is not all about fun and games... We look at the person's current abilities and needs as well as their interests, their past hobbies, work history and what new things they might like to try. We use that information to help a person with recovery or to maintain their current skills.

Our main objective is to help people achieve a good quality of life.

Music and Brain Injury

Last night I was reading a post on a Facebook board for Therapeutic Recreation directors asking about how best to use music to help people who have had traumatic brain injuries. I actually got kind of worked up reading the responses. I felt that people might not be recognizing the difference between the needs of people experiencing dementia and those with TBI. 

I wrote a short answer to that post but really I have a lot to say on the topic. Music is so much more than entertainment. It is part of who we are, a part of our experiences and what we remember. It is what some of us marched to, what we danced to at our weddings, and what we sang as we rocked our babies.

I have always loved music and grew up with it around me. My dad played piano and I started piano lessons when I was in grade two. I was always singing and I even met my husband when we were both members of our high school choir. Our four children all took music lessons and I can't begin to add up the hours of lessons, and concerts we took part in.

After I had the brain injury I developed a love / hate relationship with sound. Music and sounds had a horrible effect on me. I was very easily overwhelmed by movement and noise. The sound of music made me nauseous and dizzy and any kind of beat seemed to kick that constant headache I was feeling into high gear.  The more the music, the less I was able to focus and the more disjointed my memory and thinking became. I cried because I was missing music that had loved and I cried because music had the ability to incapacitate me even  further than I already was.

As time went by my physical and occupational therapists started to do things like adding sound and music to sessions and trying to get me to tolerate the music. A lot of therapy for dizziness is in the category of .. " You are not going to like this.. but we are going to take you to the point of being dizzy and then back it down a bit so we can build up your tolerance. Don't worry I will jump out of the way when you start to throw up!". Yes it is absolutely that horrible and you have to keep going back over and over for more torture, also called VRT or Vestibular Rehabilitation Therapy, if you want any chance of having a life outside your bedroom.

Gradually music, in small doses, became one of  my greatest therapy helps. I started guitar lessons and I am sure I would not have regained such full use of my hand if I had not worked so very hard to get my hand moving on that guitar.  What I did not realize at the time was what a big impact the music was having on helping me recover some of my cognitive skills, especially my memory and sequencing of tasks.

My husband and I joined a community choir and there I was - out of the house doing something new and something other than therapy sessions. It was social, it was a new kind of learning and it felt encouragingly like a normal person kind of thing to do.

 

As I began my journey toward becoming a Recreation Therapist it was arranged that I would volunteer at the Misericordia Hospital. One volunteer position was helping with the spiritual care, mainly transporting people, handing out music and singing my little heart out with the residents during services. The other main job was assisting in a group program led by a music therapist who came weekly to the attached personal care home. The music was so powerful in both programs and what joy it brought to the residents!

I must admit that I personally don't do that much with music when I am at work at the personal care home. I have lots of opportunity when I could choose to run a music programs, but I rarely do. I think I value the role of music so much that I don't think I can live up to my own standards for this kind of program. This issue is apparently something I currently need to work on. I either better get to be a better musician or get over my perfectionist tendencies when it comes to the topic. I will have to report back about my progress in the future.

 I wrote in a previous post about singing a karaoke song at an event at the Stroke Recovery Association of Manitoba. That incident was very powerful for me in terms of mental and emotional health. The song I picked from the list of choices was the Beetles song, Blackbird. I was really scared to sing publically but I did it and felt so brave. When I finished there was no missing that I had an impact on the other people there. At first I thought they didn't like my singing or that the song was a bit too much. No, what happened is I had hit on a common emotion and wish for the group. It was what brought us together. We were all longing for the freedom of  having our broken wings fly again. We wanted our broken eyes to see again. To be free.

 

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life- You were only waiting for this moment to arise

 

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life- You were only waiting for this moment to be free

 

The power of music. 

 

 

 

Please note

 I was unable to find copyright info for the pictures this time. If there is a problem please let me know and I will gladly give credit or remove the pictures.