The Bucket List.

There are certain traditions to the holiday season. Turkey with all its trimmings. Twinkling lights and festive trees. Family dynamics carefully gift wrapped and torn open. Over-tired and over-sugared children. Peppermint bark. Spiced eggnog. Emaciated bank accounts and New Year’s resolutions.

Each year, my holidays include a desperate attempt to start the new year off on a clean slate, with a clean house and a carefully pruned list of hopes, dreams and wishes for the year ahead. As soon as the sugar plums disappear, visions of garbage trucks coming to relieve my overstuffed trash bins of their holiday wreckage start dancing in my head and I put black ink to the notepaper that is my guilty Christmas pleasure.

It’s not that I dislike Christmas. Not at all. It’s just that ever since I’ve been on my own the new year has represented something entirely different and perpetually elusive.

Renewal.

When my husband was alive, he was fundamentally against the idea of having a ball to watch the ball drop. When he wasn’t working, he wanted to stay put. And when he was, he wanted me to stay put. And now that he’s gone, I end up staying put because I have very few options and finding childcare for New Year’s Eve borders on a search for the Holy Grail.

Recent years have left me wanting the morning after the ball drops, an emptiness that no amount of bubbly could fill. And no amount of planning or projecting or bucket-listing will erase the fact that I am starting a new year with a list of hopes, dreams and wishes that points out the shortcomings of a year I had hoped would be so much more.

We’re still in this house. I didn’t save enough. I’m still not back in my running shoes. The garage is still filled with all of his crap … plus more.

To be fair, I have a beautiful home and a comfortable life with two exceptional (if not ornery) children. I have a solid job and a loving family. The past year brought much to my life and I have much more than many, I realize. But I want to move forward. I want a new start.

I need renewal.

Putting away the final traces of a year that started with so much hope and promise and ended with a painful thud, I am standing on the dawn of new year that will inevitably bring its fair share of laughter and pain, love and tears. Uncertainty and decisions … and eternal hopes, dreams and wishes.

So I am bidding 2013 adieu with a one-finger wave and a glass of merlot … and my 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 bucket list.