Earlier this month, I promised to fill my Sunday posts with joy! Today, I’m delivering on that promise again with more simple holiday joys.

Welcome to the 92^nd edition of The Sunday Spark, a series with weekly thoughts and highlights, nuggets of learning, and a decluttering challenge for the week. Along with more simple holiday joys, this week’s edition discusses balance as an indicator of healthy aging, solar chimneys, extra senses beyond the five you’ve heard of, and doubling down on decluttering.

On my mind this week: More simple holiday joys

In Tell me about your simple holiday joys, I shared three of my simple holiday joys and invited readers to tell me about theirs. Last week, in The Sunday Spark, I shared comments I received from my readers. Today I’ve got another reader comment to share, along with a few more simple holiday joys of my own.

Here we go…

More simple holiday joys

Ab from My Life With T commented on last Sunday’s post, “I love the simple joys of the holidays, such as slowing down, sleeping in, decorating and getting together with loved ones. The simple things truly are the best parts of the holidays.”

And here are three more simple holiday joys I added to my list this week:

• When the house is all decorated for Christmas, and you can sit back and enjoy the view.
• Hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree that bring back happy memories of people and places.
• Reading a Christmas themed novel. This week I read The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose.

This Christmas, let’s shift our focus to the small things that make the holiday special. Make a list of your simple holiday joys and take the time to relish them over the next couple of weeks. And please share them with me so we can continue to fill December with simple pleasures!

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Three highlights of the week

It’s important to celebrate big milestones and simple pleasures in life. Keeping the trend going, here are three highlights and simple pleasures of the week gone by:

• My daughters enjoyed the Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver last weekend. Colleen made it home from Vancouver safely early Sunday morning. And Laura arrived home safely on Monday.
• I’m not one to binge watch TV shows but last weekend, I watched the entire Season 4 of Emily in Paris. It’s a silly show but I find it entertaining.
• On Friday, I went out for breakfast with some friends. I rarely go out for breakfast, so it was a treat!

Things I learned this week

Life is all about learning. Here are three things I learned this week:

Standing on one leg is a reliable measure of how you’re aging

How long can you stand on one leg? According to Mayo Clinic, this simple activity can be an indicator of how well we’re aging. Their research showed that, if you can stand with your full weight on one leg for 30 seconds, you’re doing very well. But even being able to balance on one leg for five seconds mean you have a reduced risk of falling.

It seems the balance exercises I’ve added to my workout routine are helping. I tried it and could stand for 60 seconds on each leg.   

Solar chimneys

Solar chimneys are the latest innovation popping up on rooftops of new buildings. While solar chimneys may look like traditional chimneys, their purpose is to regulate a building’s temperature by absorbing sunlight and converting it into heat or facilitating ventilation.

For heating, the top vent of a solar chimney remains closed to trap the heat which is then circulated to raise the indoor temperature. For cooling, the top vent is open to allow heat to escape, and cooler air is drawn in from a vent on the opposite side of the building, creating a draft that circulates through the open space.

(Source: Happy Eco News)

Senses you didn’t know you had

This week, I have been reading Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s Keep Sharp, Build a Better Brain at Any Age. It’s a fascinating read and a great follow up to the Brain Booster Challenge webinar series I attended this fall.

Something interesting I learned is we have more than the senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and hearing that we all know about. The book introduced us to 6 additional senses:

• Proprioception is the ability to sense where our body parts are and what they’re doing.
• Equilibroception is our sense of balance.
• Nocioception is our sense of pain.
• Thermo(re)ception is a sense of temperature.
• Chronoception is the sense of the passage of time.
• And interoception is the sense of our internal needs like hunger, thirst, or needing to use the bathroom.

This week’s decluttering challenges – Basement clutter & collectibles

In 2024, I’ve been revisiting the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge I completed in 2021. At the beginning of December, I realized I had fallen behind. Wanting to wrap up the challenge before Christmas, I decided to double down on decluttering for the next couple of weeks.

The first challenge for this week was a long overdue cleanup of the basement. I followed that up with decluttering collectibles. In total, I decluttered 22 items. Check out my posts on decluttering the basement and collectibles for details.

Join the challenge! Visit this post to download your free checklists and jump right in with this week’s task.

Let’s keep the joy of the season going. Drop me a comment below with your simple holiday joys.