If it sounds familiar, its because it’s a line from the holiday classic, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.  A week or two before Christmas, while I was making dinner, Adahlia walked into the kitchen and much to my amazement, said:  “hee-hee, ho-ho.”  I giggled.

Our Christmas was amazing, and we discovered that Adahlia absolutely LOVES Christmas.  She loved the fact that everyone was celebrating a baby, and she loved all the lights, and reindeer (which she already loved because of the movie Frozen).  She loved that the reindeer could fly and that Rudolph had a shiny nose.  (She still loves to put on her fairy wings and fly.)  She loved making ornaments to put on the tree (reindeer ornaments, naturally, amongst others).  She loved baking Christmas cookies on Christmas Day and listening to people sing in the church and eating the snow that miraculously started to fall on Christmas afternoon.  (She pronounces it as “schno.”)

Every day for the last month, Adahlia’s asked to watch “Rudoff – schiny- nohse” and “Frahtee schnoman”.   She is starting to talk more, and everything she says is just about adorable.  A couple weeks before Christmas, we went on a walk of the lights strung through the large park near our house.  There was a tent with Santa inside and I lifted her up to show him to her through the plastic window.  To my surprise, she immediately tried to squiggle out of my arms and began pointing to her chest, saying “Adah-da”, meaning that she wanted to meet him.  We stood in line in the cold for over an hour.  It was the first she has met Santa, and Joe was surprised she even knew who he was.  But she definitely did.  She was so excited!  She walked right up to him and let him lift her onto his lap. “What a pretty coat you have!”  Santa exclaimed.  He asked her if she wanted a doll for Christmas, and she said yes.

I was not expecting him to ask such a thing, and I was thrilled.  You see, six months ago, I had ordered a hand-made doll from a lady in England that makes waldorf style dolls.  On Christmas morning, Adahlia found her new baby sitting up on a chair next to the Christmas Tree, and she immediately hugged her to her chest.  She spent the next few days telling me how she now has two babies, and holding up two fingers.  Unlike her other baby, which looks like a swaddled infant and is called a “heavy baby” because she is weighted, this baby’s eyes are open, and she has little fingers and toes, a diaper that can be changed, a little yarn bow in her hair, and an outfit that includes booties and a hat.  Adahlia loves hats, socks, counting and doing diaper changes on her other baby and stuffed animals, so I knew she would love her new doll.  But it won’t be until tomorrow that she learns what makes this doll extra special — she has a little felt blood bag, with tubing and a velcro armband attachment, so that her baby can get a transfusion too.  When I told the lady in England about Adahlia’s condition, she offered to make it in addition to the doll.  I hesitated — I didn’t want to Adahlia to be the girl who has a doll with a blood transfusion bag now, much less in six months or a year.  I was — and still am — struggling a bit with accepting her condition as permanent, as incurable.  But I knew that to refuse the offer because I didn’t want my daughter to be transfusion dependent was not only being willfully blind, but unkind.  I didn’t want my daughter to be transfusion dependent, but she was.  A baby to receive transfusions alongside her would allow her to have a friend also going through it, and would help normalize her situation for her.

The doll certainly did not come cheap.  But she is soft, and made of natural material.  Like with all waldorf dolls, her face is sweet but intentionally minimal, so that the child’s imagination can supply the details.  Of course, there are moments when I wonder if Adahlia would prefer a gorgeously detailed doll, or even just a cheap, plastic, realistic one.  But then a father on the playground tells me that his daughter’s doll “poops” jewels… and a six-year-old girl with multiple plastic dolls asks me:  “where do you get a baby like that?” (she was referring to Adahlia’s infant baby), and I feel fortunate that we were able to choose to limit plastics, and go the natural, handmade with love, route. Besides, the following photos say it all:

“Hee hee, ho ho, and important things like that.”

If you recall, the elf in question (Hermie) wants to become a dentist, and the elf-in-charge is telling him that he’d better learn to do the important things in life, because the desire to be a dentist is ridiculous.

It’s very funny.  And it’s meant to call attention to the fact that so many in the mainstream aren’t thinking about why they are so darn sure they are right about what’s important.  In our culture, many parents would applaud a desire to be a dentist, while they would mock (gently or otherwise) a desire to make toys.  In the elf culture, its the opposite.  The line is meant to show us that we believe what we believe because we are told its what to believe.  Because its the accepted path.  Its not necessarily right.  It might not even make sense.  And it certainly doesn’t make everyone happy.

It is SO important to break through that in oneself.  To learn to become one’s own master when it comes to one’s own beliefs and thoughts.  There are a lot of movements within our society that I feel are positive, that advance our humanity and push it towards it’s highest expression.

There are also an awful lot of movements in society that are just plain awful: ignorant, foolish, wasteful, and sad.

Why are we so afraid of the different?  Rudolph and Hermie are lovable characters because they so clearly represent something that nearly all of us can all identify with, at least to some degree.  You can switch out the characters and location, but the story remains the same across cultures.  The question remains:  Why is Rudolph’s shiny nose always rejected?

Why is it that so very few people in positions of power have the ability to say, “oh, okay.  hmmm.  interesting.  run that by me again?  ok, well, that’s weird, you know.  but, let me see how i can help you.  let’s see how we might integrate you.”

Perhaps it’s like Christmas.  If everyday was Christmas, it might cease to be appreciated.  If everyone was enlightened, it wouldn’t feel so fabulous to have someone believe in you, to back you in your endeavors.

Or perhaps, the truth is, that we are all growing here.  We are all learning here.  Some people play the role of bullies, and some people are in the role of the bullied.

I believe in the importance of integrating differences together, in finding how we all fit together, to coexist together.  In the same way, I believe in integrative medicine.  It only makes sense, because we are integrated people.  We are people with bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits.  There are multiple dimensions to who we are, and when one part of us falls to the wayside, the rest of us eventually suffers, too.  We cannot ignore any aspect of who we are.  Why would we think that we could ignore aspects of our health or treat only one part of us with one type of medicine?  Think about our homes.  We cannot stop doing the dishes.  To run a healthy home, you’ve got to attend to all parts of the house, not just the roof, no matter how important the roof is to the structure of the house.  You’ve simply got to sweep, eventually.  It’s the same with medicine, society, and the globe.  You cannot hold onto one thing and say: “This.  This is it.  This is the key.  This is what’s important.”

It’s all important.  And quite possibly, we oversimplify because we can’t quite wrap our heads around the complexity of the ways in which everything interrelates.   So we come up with a few axioms and we decide that this is right, this is wrong, this is love, this is not love, this person is good, this person is bad, this time was happy, and this time was sad.  And we hang up our hats on phrases that couldn’t possibly encapsulate anything real.

Before Christmas, Adahlia could count to five.  Now, she can count to ten, and she can apply the numbers, too.  For example, she can get me two apples from the refrigerator, or four celery, or five carrots.  She will ask for three more treats for the cat if I’ve only given her two, so that the cat can have a total of five.  She knows all her letters and can find them.  Today, for the first time ever, she drew a “0” and told me it was an “o”.  It was the first letter she’s ever written.  She then drew a backwards “c” and told me it was a “c.”  She “reads” books to herself out loud, although I suspect she’s actually memorized them and isn’t actually reading.  She says small, full sentences.   Up until this week, she had difficulty with her pronouns — she referred to herself as “you” and would say things like “hat, you,” meaning it was her hat.  She still does that sometimes, although she’s recently started using the word “me” to refer to herself.  She loves to draw and color.  She has two “imaginary friends,” and she invites them into the bathtub with her and helps them step over the edge of the tub.  She breaks off bits of her food and gives it to them before she eats it.  She will put her boots on and pick up a purse or bag and tell me that she is going to their house, and leave the room.  She then comes back and tells me that she couldn’t visit them because there was too much snow at their house.  She loves Toothless from How to Train your dragon and calls him “Hamiya Da-dawin”, because he looks like Hamiya, our black kitten, who we adopted mid-October and she named.  She carries Hamiya and dances with him, and tries to share with him everything that she loves to do, like putting him under a blanket so he can “hide” and then lifting it up to “find” him.  She loves to play hiding games, and will “hide” in plain sight, inside the bathroom, curled up on the floor, or in the pantry with her back to the doors, covering her eyes.  Its been a whirlwind of winter firsts:  first time on ice skates, on skis, and sledding.

And tomorrow she will have her up-teenth transfusion, and her new baby from Santa will have her very first.

And its all important.  Its all beautiful, crazy, sad, wonderful.

And very temporary – our opportunity to experience and impact it.

Love, love, love, love.

It’s the hee-hee, ho-ho, and important things like that.