Christmas is coming… and not everyone is excited
For many, the Christmas season is a delightful time, full of festivities, gift-giving and merriment. But for others, it can bring about sadness. What if you’re not excited about digging out the ornaments, getting out the fancy napkins, trimming the tree and cooking up a storm? What if your traditions have all of a sudden change? And the dynamic is not what it once was?
Sometimes Traditions Can Change
My holiday traditions of the past were epic, huge events. I went so overtop that it was dizzying. My home looked beautiful and the food was amazing and my family gathered together. I was happily exhausted by the new year. Yes, there were stressful and awkward episodes. Grumbling in the kitchen about someone in the living room… pretty typical for family holiday gatherings. However, I never dreaded the season, never felt sad decorating my house, and I never felt a dark hole in my heart every December. Until it happened, the year my husband passed away.
So many of us have lost key people in our lives. Maybe they moved away, maybe they can’t make it home, maybe they broke up with us, maybe we broke up with them, maybe they died. These losses shift the dynamic and the energy in our homes and traditions. We all approach it in our own way, and for me it has been a new journey through December every year since my husband died. Trying to create a new normal is challenging.
How Do We Honour Ourselves During This Season?
I see how we push ourselves to meet some standard set for us, either by ourselves or by others, but it’s there. Ideally, we would do a deep introspection and decide how we want to feel and then set up our homes and traditions and events to serve that. Call in what we really need, communicate that to our family, friends and community and come to a loving consensus about how we’ll celebrate. Accept each other and our limits and needs. In this ideal, our homes become a place where we honour ourselves.
Honour Your Home By Respecting Your Limits
My work is to design interiors, and what I believe is that our home interiors are a part of our human interiors. They are connected and are metaphors for each other. Like our bodies, how you feel in your home is so much more important than how it looks.
When we design our home with loving awareness of how we feel, we respect our limits and celebrate what’s most important to us. We begin to feel our joy, find a little peace and harmonize our togetherness… all the ideals of the Christmas season but lived out in a more personal way. Maybe not how it traditionally was, but how it beautifully is now.