Hello Pioneers and welcome to the December blog!  You might be surprised to see that this month's topic isn't necessarily "holly jolly". Our society has a great way of painting the holiday season as bright, cheerful, and a time for happiness and memories, but that's not the case for everyone. We expand more on this in the podcast for this month, but specifically for this blog post we want to talk about grief and the holidays.  As we know, grief is universal and something we all have/will experience in our lifetimes, as death is a part of life. But even though it's something everyone will experience, it's not something that people like to talk about or give space to. It seems a common trend in society is to avoid the hard feelings of grief and instead expect grieving individuals to put on a positive and happy "mask" so that others aren't affected. Specifically surrounding our topic, we see this come up around the holidays when others might mak