Girlfriends, episode number 99. Stay healthy through the holidays. Hello and welcome to

Girlfriends. I'm Danielle Bean. I'm a wife and a mom and I'm on a mission to help you know your

worth as a woman so you can find peace, balance, and joy in family living.

This week, we're talking about keeping up healthy habits that we can practice even if it's

Advent and Christmas and New Year's. You know what I to another show. Welcome to another week. Welcome to

Advent. Happy Advent. I'm recording this on the second day of Advent in 2017. I hope yours is off to a

great start. Ours here at our house definitely is. I am looking forward to the

Advent season and looking forward to Christmas and trying to keep that balance between the two of them.

You know, yesterday at Mass, Monsignor Jerry at the church we were at gave this excellent homily,

which was all about our culture's push to celebrate

Christmas now, starting right after Thanksgiving, be focused on Christmas, and skip over the

Advent, skip over the waiting, skip over the quiet, the watching, even the penitential part of the

season of Advent. It was a great reminder. And I took it to heart, but I also came home and

like took out Christmas lights and hung them up in my bathroom and took out our Christmas wreath

and hung it on the wall and bought some candles for Christmas. Yeah, well, okay, we need to balance

these things, right? I mean, early in our family life, I was all about Advent is Advent. And, you know, just keeping those things separate. Christmas, we celebrate beginning the evening of December 24th, and that is it. And we even, when the kids were real little, a few of those years there waited to put up the tree until, you know, late on Christmas Eve or maybe the day before if I was, you know, being a little bit relaxed about things. And that was crazy, especially with little kids and all the different things that were going on with regard to planning for Christmas to try to cram it all into those 24 hours was kind of insane. So I had a few different meltdowns, meltdown

moments that kind of taught me. That's not what's best and we need a little bit of balance.

And not that what Monsignor Jerry was saying wasn't true. It's absolutely true. But I think we can keep

a sense of advent in our hearts, even as we are physically preparing for Christmas in all the

different ways and whatever way you're celebrating that's taking extra time and energy and thought

and preparation on your part. It's okay that that's part of the season. That's part of the waiting.

One thing that I used to do, and I still do, but it's a little more limited, is just bake through the Advent season

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