This time last year, I wrote a quick guide to making the most of your Christmas.

I had some great feedback after this, and just wanted to share it again with you  - there's many new readers this year, and there is nothing wrong with recycling!

It's not going to tell you how you should do Christmas  - that's entirely up to you of course! But this could make it a smidgen easier...

Click here to check out the article!

 

When we live abroad, times like Christmas can make the distance seem very real indeed. It can feel hard to make those decisions not to see the people we love at this time if we want to experience Christmas where we live, or if we can't make the trip home. If we do make it home, we may just have to snatch pockets of time in our frantic catch-up schedules. Or we take it easier and miss people out, which is tough too!

That is part and parcel of life living abroad, and we learn to make the best of the opportunities we do get with those we love - and to find new ways of connecting (if we can persuade our older relatives onto this new fangled technology).

So if we don't get to spend 25th December with those we love, let's look at other ways of making them part of our celebrations - we can call up, we can send stuff, we can put up their pictures on the sideboard.

Or, we can make sure that when we do see them, it's really like Christmas. But even better. Without the bells and whistles, when you sit down around the table and get together with family and friends and really appreciate being together. You don't need bath salts, or soap on a rope, decorations, or a long list of stuff to do.

Mind you, I wonder if you could still get away with that sneaky sherry at 11am?!

With my very best wishes to you and your family for a happy and healthy December.

Sincerely,
Kirstin Barton
Kirstin Barton at Alive to Change

 

I'm feeling highly amused this week at the number of articles and emails I'm being sent which make Christmas (and, in fact, the whole of December) unnecessarily complex and challenging."Your Festive Survival Guide" and "How to have the perfect Christmas" and so on. Reading these in the wrong frame of mind could easily make you feel your Christmas wasn't going to pass the test.

We all know Christmas by now. For most, it's pretty straightforward, whatever the shops, magazines and TV ads would have us believe. You can all, like me, remember when we just put up the tree on Christmas eve, stuck a few badly wrapped presents under the tree (always bath salts from the local chemist for girls, soap on a rope from the same shop for boys), and were wildly excited to find a couple of nuts and a tangerine in our woolly stocking the next day (no specific Santa Stocking for us, or cheating pair of tights, nor ski sock). We survived! And, mind you, didn't that tangerine taste good?!

I think, if I could crawl out from under this heap of Christmas cards, I'd start a campaign to Keep Christmas Simple. Or perhaps Hands Off My December. Or what about There's Nowt Wrong with Bath Salts.

Only joking! I love being buried in wrapping paper, sticking sellotape to my nose and fingers in an attempt to wrap crazily shaped presents in a half decent way. I love having a huge long list of people to buy for- that's a good thing, right? I even love having a large pile of cards to send . . . OK, that's not true, but it's more acceptable if I take it 1 at a time, and have large sips of Baileys between times.

Living abroad, we have a few extras to think about -  the tricky question over where to spend the festive season and who with (I certainly don't underestimate this one, we agonise over this each year), when (or whether) to send cards to far off places or to stick to a festive email, how pleased we are that there is on line shopping and so many gift card options, and whether those delicate hand carved wooden cribs (which seemed such good value after all that gluhwein) might not be the best thing to post home. Perhaps we have some christmas singing at school to go and listen to, and if we are really lucky, a few nights out to dress up for. Again, these are all good things, and they'll either get done - or not - and come New Year, it'll still be 1st Jan.

So, let's not allow the quantity of these good things in our lives to become a bad thing, a challenge, a something to "survive" or "get through".

Let us instead start off the festive season by celebrating the good things we already have in our lives, and looking forward to those good things coming up. OK, so it might get a little hectic later on in December when we realise we've missed the last posting date and can't remember where we put the stamps, but for now, let's enjoy the anticipation . . .

And now I'd better get myself down the village shop to stock up on bath salts . . .

With my best wishes for the whole of the festive season,

Kirstin
www.alivetochange.com

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