HODGEPODGE DECEMBER 11

 1. Do you struggle with the commercialization of the holiday season? What helps you keep your focus when the season’s busyness and commercialism start to take over? 

Honestly, I don't care. There are so many made-up holidays, like Grandmother's Day! It's all just business, but people forget that and start hearing Christmas carols in November, so by Christmas they're completely overdosed! 

2. What's one small thing you want to savor before the year ends? 

 

No idea, I savor  during the whole year ! Why wait until the year's end ?

3. December 9th is National Christmas Card Day. Do you still send Christmas cards? If so does yours include a photo or is it a more traditional card, or maybe homemade? How do you feel about the tradition of exchanging cards at the holidays? If Hanukkah is the holiday you celebrate in December do you send cards to mark the occasion? 

I send self created Christmas cards but I do everything by computer. Of course I include pictures and send them into the whole world by WhatsApp or email. I don't know anybody who doesn't own a tablet or a smartphone or even a computer.

These are from previous years, 

4. What's your least favorite holiday related task? What's your favorite? 

All the preparations. But I don't need them anymore. Apart from packing parcels, I don't really have any specific tasks. Once that's done, that's my favorite task.

Christmas in the past with a lot of parcels

5. Let's do a little holiday this or that? 

• shopping or wrapping
• baking or decorating
• eggnog or wassail
• real tree or artificial
• turkey or ham
• white lights or colored lights 
• ugly sweaters or matching pjs
• peppermint or cinnamon 
• presents Christmas Eve or presents Christmas Day
•  
• The only "this or that" would be to give the presents on Christmas Eve, which is tradition in my family and in Germany, we are no morning people. And the kids sleep better when they get the gifts in the evening and not having to wait until the morning    

6. Insert your own random thought here. 

I feel a bit like living in two worlds. The past and the present especially now during Christmas time. I help decorating the castle's Christmas trees, but in my room I haven't done anything yet.

I just let it go. Now my mini family will come on the 20th and we will celebrate Christmas a bit earlier, because then they have to go to my SIL's mother and father who are divorced since ages, one lives far away from Amsterdam at the German border and the other only 60 km far, but still the poor once have to drive from one to the other. 

Tomorrow I intend to go Christmas shopping, just little things not like when we were a young couple and then grandparents.