Welcoming Homes

This is a month of visiting and hosting friends. I've been pondering the art of true hospitality. Not being the perfect hostess and chef. Not having the perfectly clean and decorated home. But letting warmth and love permeate the corners of your home. Honoring people, relationships and memories in your home. I love this excerpt from Real Learning's blog:

However, homes of true ladies are not magazine-perfect, nor so clean that they are sterile. Instead, they are inviting. Beauty is not a buff, polished, dyed, surgically-corrected woman in clothes that could finance an Indian family for a year. Beauty is the acceptance of the body created perfectly for the soul He infused in it. It’s good stewardship and care of that temple. It’s attention to detail but not obsession and vanity. It’s being ladylike: with gentleness and grace that are a style of their own. And so it is at home.

Sights and smells and even sounds of those ladylike homes welcome the weary to stay and be comforted. Whether it’s a simple vase of flowers on a dreary January day or freshly squeezed lemonade in the heat of July, the home cheers its inhabitants while not being wearisome or ostentatious. It’s not about the show; it’s about ministering to souls with gentle, thoughtful, grace. And the homemaker who lives there calls frequently upon the Blessed Mother for the grace she needs to see to the all the details with calmness and composure.

The ladylike homemaker goes about her daily round with one purpose: to live as God wants her to live. It does no good if her house shines from top to bottom and her drapes coordinate perfectly with the upholstery and she has hand-glazed all her walls if she has done it all to impress her neighbor and she has been less-than-gracious to her children in getting it that way. We want to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, not as the lady across the street is perfect.