I’ve written the last couple of days about various ways of sharing stories (especially family stories) during the holidays. Saturday’s was about eschewing consumerism and instead sharing family stories; yesterday’s was about “digi-scrapping,” which my sister and I have apparently been inadvertently doing with some recent Christmas projects.

In the midst of all this, I received an e-mail from storytelling author (Storycatching) Christina Baldwin about a unique holiday tradition she observes:

For two weeks, in the heart of winter, my family and I go completely off-line. This tradition is a local phenomenon that many friends and colleagues use in part to add reflection to their holidays.

Completely off-line? Could I do that? I don’t think so. Since I went online 15 years ago, the Internet has been my lifeline, my social life. My husband can tell you how anxious I become when our Internet connection is down or when we’re on the road and encounter a spot without Wi-Fi. The online world is the refuge for this uber-shy, utterly phone-phobic gal who is much more comfortable communicating in writing.

Wouldn’t my story life suffer if I took two weeks off from being online? Would it be awful if I didn’t blog for two weeks? Would the world stop spinning if people didn’t know my Twitter or Facebook status? Even as I contemplate this notion of sharing family stories during the holidays, the Internet seems an integral part of researching, sharing, and visually presenting stories.

And yet … what Christina Baldwin describes sounds lovely — and tempting — too:

… this is exactly the holiday/holy day gift my partner and I give each other: two weeks of retreat, rest, reading, wandering, letting go of the never-ending-list of things to do. We’ve been doing this for years, ever since her children got on the plane to visit their father at Christmas…and after they were grown, we discovered it’s the only time the business really lets us stop. So, we do.

The Holy Nights, from Winter Solstice to Epiphany, are a magical time to reflect at the hearth. I turn off the wi-fi in my laptop, write bounce-back messages for the email programs, dictate “we are closed… we are resting…” voicemail messages for the business and private phone lines. And then it’s up to me to have the discipline to truly turn aside from distraction and business and commitments and projects in progress and BE WITH… myself, my story, my life, my spirituality, my sense of mystery and ceremony. Inside, and outside-to follow intuition and instinct rather than obligation and task. Shhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhh. The song of snow, the whisper of waves.

We spend long hours sitting by the fire, enjoying the Christmas tree, writing in my journal, reading novels. We walk in the woods and on the beach and don’t care when we get home. We develop little ceremonies within the days that rise spontaneously out of slowing down and noticing more. I try out new recipes and we linger at the table in long conversation.

Reading, writing, recipe-ing, conversing, following intuition? Being with my own story? Yummmm. One of my greatest laments of late has been lack of time to read. In fact, my New Year’s resolution is to carve out an hour a day to really read — beyond my non-negotiable ritual of reading the newspaper and the incalculable time spent reading from computer screens.

If I were to follow Christina’s lead, I think I’d need more time to mentally prepare. Maybe next year….