There are lots of different women held up as the ideal homemaker. Pre-industrial, Little House on the Prairie, 1950s, homesteader, trad wife, witch. Some speak to us, some don’t. For instance, I have zero attraction to the 1950s housewife. She doesn’t inspire me. The homesteader mixed with a bit of witch gives me plenty of “scope for the imagination.” We each have to decide which ideal inspires our effort. What we must not do is worship at the ideal’s feet. What we must not do is judge others by the ideal we have chosen. We are all here to make an effort, ladies, not earn our worth.

Ideals go in and out of style. When I was young, it was June Cleaver, the 1950s American, who was the ideal. Now it’s the homesteader/trad wife/pre-industrial. All of these have good and bad elements. They’re all flawed.

When our only goal is how quickly we can get something done and how easily we can do it, we stop caring about that thing. What does it matter if it is broken, destroyed, or trashed? When we haven’t poured any labor into something, we don’t care about what happens to it. And when we don’t care about what happens to it, we stop investing in it. It is like that rental house. The person who lives there doesn’t care. They don’t mow the lawn. They don’t beautify the property. It is an eyesore to the whole neighborhood. Or think about the difference between how you feel about the cucumber you harvested from your own garden vs. the one bought from the store. You probably don’t feel a thing about the one you bought at the store, but the one you harvested? You took a picture of it, crowed about it, and relished sharing it with family and friends. It matters to you because you put the hard work into growing it. This is true about raising chickens, too. Every egg matters because of the work you poured into that egg.

God is good, and He cares about His creation. Freya’s death wasn’t unknown or outside of His control. She wasn’t unknown to Him. Not many people may realize that a chicken makes a sweet companion, but God knows. He set Freya in my path a little over a year ago, randomly, humanly speaking, chosen by the Tractor Supply guy, and gave me a whole year with her. A whole year. I don’t know why, but I found it a great comfort to know that the Lord created her, loved her, and was in charge of her beginning and end and that it mattered to Him, she mattered to Him. He knows when the sparrows fall.

An important skill for the HearthKeeper is the ability to romance our lives, to view life romantically. This isn’t maintaining a giggle-bubble, the often-confused-with-love romance, but it does have a similar softening and gentleness. It is not so much the overused '80s filter that turned the man and woman staring into each other’s eyes all fuzzy. It’s more like the snow and petals constantly drifting about in Legend. (Watch it. You now have homework.) Romanticizing our life and work has a bit of grit and cleverness in the gentleness. It is a choice to be comforting and merry when we could be cold and harsh. It is a choice for beauty, not just utility.

As I got away from social media, I got more and more burnt out about social media. How am I getting more burnt out doing less? Is getting over the dopamine addiction to being noticed? I’m used to having my fingers in several different ‘pies’ that let me interact with the internet. I’ve grown used to likes, hearts, and such. Now that I’m not really on social media, I’m not getting that little rush that says someone liked what I had to say. I’ve pulled back to things that cost people: podcasts and blog articles. These aren’t short and quick for the listener/reader or for the writer/producer. They require time and thought.

The sweet truth is that when we put in the effort to educate ourselves about this calling and life-long, always-on vocation, when we practice day in and day out, when we cultivate good attitudes, and correct our thinking, homemaking becomes more restful, not less. The sweet truth is that when we are home (I mean actually home), our homes become more expansive. I’m less a slave shackled to my kitchen now than I ever was as an employee, manager, or owner in the past. How is my life “easier” (kinder, healing, gentler) when I’m on call 24/7 as opposed to 8-9 hours of work? Because homemaking isn’t a 9-5 job, so the mindset and the pace are completely different.

Details aren’t just about dirt and annoyance. Details are about beauty and fun. And if that doesn’t sum up homemaking, I don’t know what does.

Making this list and using correct labels has grounded me so that I don’t become too self-focused, anxious, and filled with self-pity. I just might be overwhelmed because I mislabeled extracurriculars as the meat and bones of my homemaking, allowing myself to be led by the nose into the ditch of too much instead of seeing the true nature of what I am doing.

As I worked on the three articles about hospitality, something jumped out at me: this is our work all the time. We don’t just try to fortify our guests. We want our people to be fortified too. We don’t just make sure our company has a place to sit and drinks and clean bathrooms. We want that for our people too. We don’t just make sure our company is welcomed, tended, sheltered, and fed. We want that for our people too.

Our goal when having guests over is for them to leave fortified. We want them to feel cherished and ready to go back to their lives with more strength than when they arrived at our door. We want them to know they’re loved, valued, and understood. If people leave stressed, embarrassed, and thinking they never want to come over to our homes again, we’ve done something wrong.

Play is vital to our hearts and minds and thus to our homemaking. Play is vital to the mental health of humans, so that makes it our responsibility. We must nurture and nourish an environment of play in our hearts and hearths. We must stop viewing everything as burdens, chores, and dull responsibilities. We are the HearthKeepers! Laugh, dance, sing, and play for the mutual well-being of your home, hearth, self, and people. Learn, dear ladies, to have fun!

Hospitality is sheltering human finiteness with love and compassion and understanding. This means we must take into account the physical needs of the people around us. This work is how we build strong cultures within our families and strong communities and connections with those outside our four walls.

It is not a waste of our lives to learn to be merrily durable in our homes. Merry Durability is our watchword and our foundation.

It was not so much in what I was doing that I was feeling discombobulated, it was in my thinking. I had failed to stop and think through why I was doing what I was doing so that I could go slow and calm. I had failed to properly label the labor. The few minutes it took me to work through my morning revealed to me that 90% of my off feeling was in my head. The chores and projects were fine. The day was a messy day. Things were going to get messier before they got cleaner, but it wasn’t out of control. My sense of it was.

When I first came home and stepped away from “my career” I said yes to all the things and was never really focused on my home. As I said at the start, one of the blessings of my chronic health issues was being forced to be home and focus on home. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to just go-go-go all the time. I want to find the balance between housekeeping and hospitality. I want to have slow, quiet days and weeks. I want to be careful with my health. Housekeeping and Hospitality must be held in tension to stay in the golden mean.

But we are the HearthKeepers and we take the reign of darkness and cold and turn her into our handmaid of coziness and warmth. We are not afraid of the darkness and cold for we see how to use them and how to defeat them. We’ve done it over and over, going back down the line of other HearthKeepers behind us and training HearthKeepers coming up after us.

Christmas isn’t about the stuff. (Repeat this with me every day! Christmas isn’t about the stuff!) Christmas is about the gift of being home together as a family, whether that is a blood family, a found family, your church, or your community. Christmas is a broad holiday. It shelters war stories, ghost stories, trees, troubles, and magic. It shelters good Christian men rejoicing! Don’t make it about the stuff.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I might be able to accomplish some of the things on my pit list and to-do list. I have rooms that need painting, deep cleaning that needs to be done, organization that has fallen by the wayside, and a garage and shed that need to be better utilized. A home must be constantly maintained, or it will fall into disrepair, and this isn’t just cleaning out gutters, but organizing and beautifying.

Instead of feeling like I’m also trapped in a cage, it’s given me a reason for my slow living. I need to go in and out today so that I can keep a close eye on the hens' location. I need to take this break so that they can run around a bit. I need to make sure I’m not gone all the time because these creatures depend on me. What I thought might be a hindrance has proven to be a liberty.

Hospitality is a worthy engagement of our time and skill. It is a worthy endeavor of the homemaker. What are we, ladies, if we’re not being hospitable? Isn’t tending to the physical and emotional needs of others the whole point of all we do? Then it should be within our reach to include others in that worthy work.