While getting perspective is good at any time, I think it’s especially useful at this time of year. The holidays can be beautiful and joyous but also filled with stress and “musts.” If you are someone who gets so busy doing a gazillion things to make the holidays “perfect,” perhaps it’s time to realize that they don’t need to be perfect if it damages your physical or mental health (and not to mention your fiscal health). Take some time to consider what you are doing for joy and what you are doing to fulfill the expectations of others – and trim accordingly. Reach out to loved ones and ask how to simplify gatherings.
On the other hand, if you are typically a Scrooge, perhaps it’s time to lighten up and see some of the joy and peace of the season. While our society pushes a certain image of the winter holidays upon us, we don’t have to accept them. Some of my favorite holiday evening were just a small group of us having cocoa and popcorn with a movie and the Yule lights on.
Blessings!
Thistle
Hawk
Meaning: Hawk (Seabhac in Gaelic) brings the ability to see your life in perspective, to free you of unnecessary baggage and to connect you to your ancestral roots. See if you can take some time out of your daily routine to survey your life calmly and to see events in context. The Hawk can help you to recollect the missing pieces of the jigsaw you will be trying to assemble and he will help, too, to spot the details which are significant.
When you have a sense of your roots and of the breadth of your life, you will start to feel pride and a growing sense of nobility and stature. Once you know where you have come from and where you are going, your life will be filled with inspiration and enthusiasm, you will sense a new day dawning, and you will be able to make decisions with confidence.
On the flip side, Hawk can suggest that you could be paying too much attention to detail. Being precise and “hawk-eyed” can be valuable, but taken to its extreme and without a wider overview, it can lead to cruelty. High ideals, if not balanced with a sense of humility, lead to arrogance and ultimately denial of the heart. Be careful not to get carried away by the justness of your cause, while forgetting to take into consideration the feelings of others.
Druid Animal Oracle by authors Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm and artist Will Worthington
Parting the Mists 
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