How I Get Into The Holiday Spirit As A Single Mom

Shops are loaded with Christmas stuff: sweets, decorations, gift boxes. This is my second Christmas as a single mother and to be honest, sometimes it's not easy to feel the holiday vibes.

Last Christmas was kind of weird. I was used to doing everything all by myself around the holidays (shopping, gift wrapping, decorating, cooking, etc.) but the thought of my daughter having to spend the holidays at two different places was lingering above my head and heart like a dark cloud.

I decided not to focus on the materialistic aspect of the holidays and did my best to create memories and make as much time for myself as possible.

Our cats are keen on climbing up the Christmas tree, so last year I wanted to save myself from having to be a tree guard and I left our 6-foot tree in the garage and bought a small pine tree at Lidl. It was a real one in a bucket and it was about 70 cm tall, or 1 metre with the bucket. I used only few ornaments (some of them were homemade) on the tree but made a paper advent calendar with Bible verses for each day of December. Instead of buying a truckload of stuff, my daughter and I baked gingerbread, made a small advent centrepiece for our dining table and had quality time together.

Our small Christmas tree. I used an IKEA rug to imitate snow.

These are our initials made of polymer clay. One for me, one for my daughter.

I made this ornament two or three years ago and I still love it.

For my parents, I made gift baskets. My dad is a chocolate addict, so he got fancy chocolate and chocolate-covered cookies. In my mom's gift basket, I put a moisturizer, an eyeliner pencil and other things like that. We visited them on 23 December because I wanted to make Christmas Eve as peaceful as possible. The menu was a typical Sunday lunch thing with salmon, rice and salad, along with some traditional beijgli.

This year, I'm doing what I did last year. I've already done the Christmas shopping. I only have to buy food for our Christmas lunch, but the menu and the shopping list are ready, so I don't have anything to do except for focusing on inner peace and closing out the commercial, let's-buy-all-we can attitude aspect of the holidays. I'm planning to have a lot of me-time when my daughter is at her father's place and spend time with friends. I've already written a post about how I spend alone time.

How are you preparing for the holidays?

(source of the title photo: Christmas photo created by freepik - www.freepik.com)