Press PLAY button on your life

Ah! Another Christmas passed. That’s a unique time in the world, no matter how you celebrate it, how you spend it and with whom you do it.

I fully celebrate the Christmas holiday. Starting, traditionally in my country, from a Christmas Eve supper with my family.

I've had my own family for almost 12 years now and oh man, that is an adventure every year. To prepare the celebration of Christmas Eve and two days of holiday that has never been an easy ride. All of the expectations (most of them only in my head) to have a clean and beautifully decorated house, all the delicious homemade food on the table for the whole Christmas and the calm atmosphere during preparations and actual celebration.

So, you can imagine it ‘s been a huge challenge to meet my expectations and be ready with everything while working full time, having two kids and daily responsibilities at the same time.

Hard work, little sleep, multitasking.

Frustration, exhaustion, madness.

Result? Not a festive atmosphere at all. And always something that could look better, taste better, be better. Always something “I could have done better”.

Real result - I don’t like Christmas at all. And now you know why.

My organizational skills were never in favor at this time of a year as I was driven by my emotions and unachievable desires and neither by my sense of rationality nor prioritization.

As you can imagine, I have ruined (more or less) a few Christmas holidays until I have started coming to my senses. But the journey of healing my Christmas Spirit has been very long as I still tried different things to squeeze everything in given time.

🔥I tried to start the prep work weeks before so I have home cooked meals for holiday, just some of them in my freezer.

🔥I tried to start cleaning up weeks before - starting from the not so exposed places and leaving the most exposed like floors and couches to the last day.

🔥I tried to buy all the presents and pack them already weeks before.

🔥Not to mention preparing outfits for me and the kids, packing all of us when we were leaving to my family for holidays and other things on my to do list

And it worked, somehow. However. I observed that my stress level just before the due date wasn’t lower. Even higher some years at it cumulated for a longer time!

I definitely needed to try something else.

Then I came into a piece of advice that could have been mine but sometimes you just need to hear it from another person:

📣 - Choose and prepare only the things that are the most important for you during Christmas, without which it’s not Christmas anymore and skip everything else.

WOW! How genius is that! Everyone has these few things that make Christmas for them and other things are just nice to have right? BRILLIANT

I started implementing it just last Christmas time. So it’s still something I am learning. But I can already say it works!

When I decide what is the most important for me to prepare for holiday, I don’t regret not having other things in place. And, I am more open to accepting others' contributions to e.g. our Christmas Eve supper with things I don't find that important to prepare them myself.

And most important, when I agree with myself that the relaxed atmosphere and calm time spent with my closest family is the thing I cannot imagine Christmas without, I don’t bother if my windows are clean or if we managed to go to my parents’ for Christmas or my son is sick and we need to stay at home for the whole time. 🌟

Christmas preparation tip that you can use in many occasions