A chronically designed Christmas

Celebrating Christmas is a concept that can behave in slightly different ways depending on the situation and environment. Many are celebrating an old-fashioned Christmas with all the traditional ingredients. You may celebrate with family and/or friends, while some spend the Christmas holidays in their loneliness, involuntarily or voluntarily. I myself celebrate a chronically adapted Christmas in self chosen trinity, ie with my hubby and the pooch. 

Circumstances may, as said, be a little different, but if you add chronic illness to the situation, Christmas can be a stress factor and a huge energy thief, especially if you have a family and feel a need to be there for others than just yourself. In that regard, I am fortunate to have quite good conditions for reducing Christmas stress and saving energy.

I love Christmas with all the preparations and would prefer to go all in with all the traditional ingredients, but I have slowly been forced to reduce these by prioritizing what I absolutely cannot be without, this because of my increasing diagnoses. I have thus been forced to let a lot of my inherited traditions go, things that belong to the old family tradition.

The measures I take are mostly all kinds of energy saving tricks that help me enjoy Christmas instead of having to suffer setbacks consisting of increased aches and persistent fatigue.

I relinquish the rigorous and exhausting Christmas cleaning in favor of good selfmade meatballs and fresh homebaked coffee bread, I cut down on the Christmas lights and Christmas decorations and by that I save energy when hanging them up and taking them down. It's a saving both in terms of electricity bills and my own energy.

We no longer get any Christmas tree, instead I decorate our permanently electrified ornamental rice. It's faster, easier and hilariously different. Sometimes I vary with an artificial mini-Christmas tree.

We no longer exchange Christmas presents, which helps us avoid the hysterical Christmas shopping.

Well, these are some examples of how I, so to speak, shrinks Christmas in favor of greater well-being.

In the past, in my healthy life, I loved going absolutely bananas with everything I think Christmas should contain, but now I choose tranquility and Christmas joy instead of glitter and Christmas stress.

Hope you do the same ...

A very Merry Christmas to you from me!

XOXO 🎅