“It’s not about presents but it is about your presence. Therein lies the spirit of the holiday season.” ― Julieanne O’Connor
“The holiday season is about love! Share it. Spread it. Live it.” ― Amy Leigh Mercree
“Find the sweetness in this holiday season. Embrace the endless love that surrounds you.” ― Amy Leigh Mercree
In my last blog I spoke directly about how to prepare yourself for the holiday season addressing the topic of varying emotions that many people go through this time of the year. This time of the year facilitates not only varying emotions, varying levels of emotions for people globally, even if Christmas is not celebrated.
This blog is more about traditions and why I believe that traditions are so important for children to grow up with. Traditions shape children and can give them a “happy place” to go when life in the grown up world gets tuff at times. Let’s face it, life can get tuff sometimes as a grown up. Now I’m learning to blend parenthood with grandparenthood. Its not tuff at all, it is a stage in my life that Im blessed to have learnt about traditions early in my life as I gain much pleasure from seeing our kids developing their own traditions from their childhood and now building them for their families from their happy memories. I talk about inner happiness in this blog post.
Preparing ourselves for the holiday season has everything to do with the stages of our life, our awareness of ourselves, our personal and working routines and rituals, the ability to work through what is important to us, our ability to be who we are naturally no matter who we are with and what we do. Preparing ourselves for any holiday season is all about building traditions that make us the people who we are and those qualities and experiences are reflected in how we engage in our working life.
How to Prepare Yourself For Your Holiday Season was the topic on this The Global Womens Voice Conversation where Dr Hilda Maldanado and Regina Paula spoke about how they prepare themselves for their holiday season.
Holiday and specifically Christmas Traditions were spoken about in depth with people contributing, in the online forum, from varying ages, family structures, experiences and cultures. For example Kim White shared her traditions coming from a very different family structure and time of her life living in the United States, being the main carer for her parents to Rosemary, living in Kenya, a single mother of a 16 year old, who also shared her Christmas Traditions. Then Regina is at another stage of her life with her daughter listening, gathering ideas to facilitate her family traditions for her new family.
We all contributed to my suggestion of doubling your time for my personal time. Time for me, time for me to self direct myself through meditations, journaling, walking the beach barefoot time and swimming, exercise time, family time, exploring my hobbies. This can be difficult when we are in the stage of life of small children, teenagers, caring for elderly parents. The different stages of life really does shape the way our time can be spent when we are responsible for more than just ourselves and our own wellbeing.
Here is a list of tips and techniques that everyone can use on…
How to Prepare yourself for The Holiday Season
- Build your traditions for memoires to be created.
- Build your adult role to engage with family and friends to add value.
- Double your self care time.
- Engage in meaningful conversations.
- Check in on family and friends.
- Flesh out and solidify your values.
- Practise in asking for what you personally need.
- Give your time to do the best work in everything you do.
- Be Mentally and Emotionally present in all situations.
- Write clearly what your intentions are for the next year, tip.. not your goals!
- Plan your food to eat good food.
- Work and play in your life considering the stage of life you are in.
Wishing you restful and playful Holiday Season.
Join me in the live virtual conversations, to have open sessions with me. Please visit the events page for more details.
What are your Holiday Traditions, I’d love to read about in the comments
Sending you love and big hugs,
Di
when I was scrolling through your website, I saw the good works that you have been putting on your website. your articles are so interesting and it is like I have never seen an article like yours before. keep on doing the good work that you are putting on your unique website and I will keep on viewing your updates have a nice day.
Jade, thankyou for coming by and scrolling, reading and absorbing some of my “off the normal page” thinking and writing. I only write and speak from my own experiences.
I trust you can always take advantage of my life experiences and my mistakes
Di