Elemental Grace

Extreme Christmas

November 11, 2009

I think Christmas brings out the extreme in people.

Year after year, we’re told to strive for the ‘perfect Christmas’ with articles from various magazines on decorating and preparing puddings and organising your turkeys in October until we start planning from August for fear of getting something wrong or missing something out. It becomes a pressure cooker of expectation meets experience, which from my point of view is just impossible to meet. It seems to invariably lead to tears, tempers and rows and very rarely seems to engender that magical Christmas spirit that we so look forward to.

I took a day off today, and instead of sewing or painting and doing something useful and went to Bath for a day out with my sister. Since we both moved, we don’t see as much of each other, and it makes the chance to get together that bit more special. It was lovely, we had long lunches in Cafe Rouge drinking hot chocolate and eating steak baguettes before going shopping for beautiful boots in Duo (I resisted but it wasn’t easy) and looking at stunning homewares and interior decorating books in Vinegar Hill before ooh-ing and aah-ing over beautiful christmas decorations.

It’s the first time I’ve hosted a Christmas. I’ve always been somewhere else with family or friends and it’s the first time I’ve ever had my own home to decorate or my own Christmas to organise or be excited about. I was initially a little worried with it being the first proper Christmas since Dad passed away. But for the first time today, I started to think it might not be so scary after all.

Bath Spa

Walking around beautiful Bath today, and perusing home style magazines, I started to slowly realise that Christmas didn’t have to be a stressful affair and it didn’t have to be structured or formal either. It’s an opportunity for me to start shaping my own traditions, my own style and my own Christmases. I have a chance to make this my own, comforting, relaxed Christmas in a way that really reflects what I believe in and the way I want to live my life. It sounds silly, but that had never really occurred to me before.

For the first time, I’ve seen this coming Christmas as  a new start, and a chance to take the traditions that shaped my childhood Christmases and find a way of putting my own twist on them. With this new perspective, walking through Bath in the chilled wintery air, I started to feel that tingle of excitement that Caroline blogged about only the other day considering what I really wanted out of Christmas.

I’d been asked the other day what I wanted for my birthday and Christmas this year and my honest answer was very little. There is relatively little that I am desperate to own and after the last couple of years, it has really driven home to me how little material goods mean and how much more important it is to be happy with your life and your friends. After hours and hours of racking my brains, I came to the conclusion that the best gifts were the things that really meant something when they were being put together, that contained thought and effort. I love photos of my friends in handpainted frames, momentos of places we’ve all been together, things that remind me of the important things in life. That’s what I want out of Christmas. Just that and the time to spend with the people I love and don’t get nearly enough of a chance to is the best present a girl could have.

So here’s to building your own Christmases. I hope that wherever you are and whatever you do for it, it’s a time for something special for you too.

Filed under: Rolling with the Punches

Tags: Hide The Minced Pies and Crack Out The Champers: It's Christmas