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I hope you have all had a very happy holiday season. I don't know how you handle the Christmas holiday ending and New Year adjustments, but I have some ideas that have made it easier for me.
We have always put up a real tree -I've also planted many. I love the smell; love how it transports me back to happy childhood memories. I love to look at it in the evening all lighted with many colored lights and twinkling icicles. I hate to take it down. I have used the religious celebration of the Three Wise Men's visit as an excuse to keep it up longer...I touched it last night and needles dropped quite easily. I'm really not worried about a fire...I'm more concerned about the "downs."
To replace my negative ruminating about how long it takes to prepare for the holidays and how quickly it's over I try to focus on the New Year coming. I think about what I want to do this year for vacations, education, set goals, but more than all this simple distraction, I have learned over time to not let myself get too HIGH during the preparation. Our very nature craves balance. If I allow myself to be completely immersed in preparations for "the day," I find myself, body, mind, and spirit, bouncing off walls. I can lose my equilibrium-not good. I think this is especially important for those of us with anxiety disorders. We have lived for months and years either high or low and slowly lost balance.
If our holiday schedules are erratic and hectic, if we allow ourselves to be driven to find the perfect gift, to perfectly decorate, in general- try to please everyone from our child to the postman, we will gradually find ourselves in a state of constant stress arousal. Why wouldn't our January, mundane, schedule be a shock to our in-over-drive system!?
I propose that the fact that we get the "downs" tells us we've been "up"-too high. J When one is so high that we can't focus on all aspects of our life, if our only focus is on one day or one week, there is really no place for us to go but down when "it" is over.
I suggest that we can change this. I think we can learn from the past and recreate our behavior, mental and physical, toward a healthier celebration and transition. Examine how much of your overall timetable the holidays took up. See if you can shrink that a bit for next year. I did all my shopping via catalogues this year. I did not bake cookies, I don't need to eat cookies for one thing, but I also have 6 daughters who bake and if they bring a few on Christmas Eve, my able-to-eat-cookies husband will have some. We provided the main dish for Christmas dinner and everyone brought a side dish.
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