A Weekly Holiday

an invitation to rest

Imagine having a weekly holiday.

Imagine that every single week, you are committed to spending one whole day eating good food and doing things you enjoy…and not necessarily doing anything at all. For one whole day, there’s nothing you need to accomplish.

Imagine that you went to bed tired all week but now have a whole day dedicated to sitting back and enjoying.

When you release yourself from your own expectations—even just for one day each week—you are reminded that you are not omnipresent. You cannot be everything for everybody all the time. And that’s okay.

A day of rest encourages you to work hard throughout the week, then stop at the end of it—regardless of what you got done—and admit that your work will always be with you. It will always be a pain in some ways. There will always be more that you could be doing. But this day is not the day to think about those pains.

A day of rest is intended to serve you and do what’s best for your family’s physical, mental, and spiritual/emotional health. If it’s a burden, you’re doing it wrong 😉

Here’s what a good day of rest looks like for us:

• On Saturday night, we have an extra-yummy dinner.

• We light two candles to remind ourselves to stop and celebrate. We announce that our day of rest has begun. The kids cheer.

• On Sunday morning, we go to church (which we enjoy) and come back home for our favorite Trader Joe’s frozen meals and super easy cleanup.

• We drink fancy drinks and eat dessert. I let the kids have mocktails or sparkling cider.

• I take a nap if I want to. (That’s why the kids are allowed extra screen time on this day 😅)

• We play outside, read aloud, practice art, and have no job other than to enjoy life’s blessings.

• On Sunday night, we eat leftovers from the fridge and reflect on how great our day was. And we are ready for a new week of hard work.

Everyone in our family looks forward to our day of rest. We count down the days toward it. We put in extra effort—in cleaning, food preparation, school, etc.—so that the essentials are done before the day of rest begins. (Or at least…that’s the ideal. But the day of rest begins whether we finished everything or not!)

Maybe your day of rest is going to be Tuesday night to Wednesday night, and you have a no-screens rule. Great!

Maybe your day of rest will be from Friday night to Saturday night, and you invite friends over for pizza to begin your feast. Sweet!

We’ve been adjusting what our day of rest looks like for years! At first, my husband—a small business owner—didn’t think he could actually take a whole day off each week, so the kids and I had our own little celebrations. Eventually, my husband decided to participate because he realized that he, too, can’t be everything for everyone. Thankfully, it’s now a whole-family celebration.

This idea of a weekly day of rest is not a new one. Jewish people have been celebrating a weekly shabbat for thousands of years!

Regardless of your beliefs, and however you choose to implement this day of rest, I hope it does a lot for you. If you’d like to read more, my friend Becca wrote a great post about this last year.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or if there’s anything from your weekly day of rest that you love doing!

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts

P.S. I keep lots of Trader Joe’s meals stocked in my freezer just in case we spontaneously choose to have friends over on our day of rest. I’m happy to serve made-from-scratch fare at other times, but…on my day of rest? “Help yourself to the microwave.” 😅 And friends love it!