Does life seem a little high-pressure right now?  It often is, and we’re hitting the Christmas season with great gusto. As we deal with all kinds of circumstances in our lives, it’s nice to have a place where we can go where we know we will always belong. I did that recently as I’ve done for more than a decade–returning to my roots. Every year some of us girls from high school meet in Branson MO and we have a pajama party.

Some folks might shudder at the thought. Yikes! High school? But after a decade or two or three or…well, anyway, after quite a few class reunions, our small class realized we really like each other. We enjoy spending time together. We share a lot of memories, and being the same age draws us together. We’re buddies.

So when we girls get together every year in Branson, all we care about is spending as much time with each other as we can, catching up on the past year, and eating. Oh yeah, we choose a place where we can all be in the kitchen at once and talk and talk and talk. And we laugh a lot. I drove two days–one of those days through a blinding snowstorm–just to get there and see the girls.

We support and love one another and have wonderful time of laughter. It’s a time of grounding. When you spend time with the right members of a family–or in this case, friends who knew you through your teens–you can get a clearer picture of how far you’ve come and how much you’ve grown from those awkward years.

Do you have people in your life who can connect you to your past in a good way? People who love and respect you, are proud of who you’ve become? I highly recommend you take the trouble to spend quality time with those people.