The countdown has begun!

Advent calendars are up in living rooms and kitchens across the country, letters to Santa are being posted, cards are frantically written to include the standard, hastily scribbled “we MUST meet up in the New Year” messages, and shops are full to bursting with gift ideas and consumers desperately trying to find something (anything!) to wrap up and put under the tree.

Familiar?  Yep, me too.

With three small-ish girls, each of whom have high expectations that I do my very best to meet, Christmas is an exciting time.  I love it too – watching the excitement build up over the month until they are pretty much ready to explode from it by the time Christmas morning comes around.  Since having the girls, Christmas has become far more special, and as a family we try incredibly hard to do as much of it together as we can – we have a Christmas to-do list on our fridge for all the fun stuff:

We put up the tree and decorate the house together:

We visit Santa:

We have days out together to see the Christmas lights being switched on in town:

and to visit the annual Christmas tree festival:

All in between the usual balancing act of both my husband and I working all hours of the day and night, shopping for presents, ensuring that the correct nativity costumes are with the correct child on the correct day and that each of us is present to watch each child’s play on each of the nights it’s being performed, planning (and shopping for) the Christmas Day lunch, and attempting to ensure that the house is in some sort of reasonable state when the various guests we’ll have staying with us arrive.

Oh, and that’s not even mentioning the VERY different to-do list that I have for all the not-so-fun stuff that needs doing – the behind-the-scenes work that goes on in the background to make Christmas magical.

It’s tough.  And expensive.  And hard work.

And if I’m honest sometimes a bit of the joy and magic seems to get lost in all the chaos.  There is so much pressure to buy more and more stuff, and even to DO more and more stuff, that December just becomes one big treadmill of shopping centres and supermarkets and car journeys.

So this year, having recently made my pledge to myself to slow down, keep it simple and be where I am, I’m focusing a lot on making Christmas less about ‘stuff’ and more about making memories.

I came across this in Facebook the other day and it sums up what I’m trying to say perfectly…

I’m adopting this as my new Christmas to-do list.

As much as possible anyway.  I wish I could tell you that I’ll be shredding that other to-do list, but in truth, most of that stuff does still need to be done.  The difference is that I’ll do it whilst keeping this new list in mind too.  So if one of my girls asks me to sing Christmas songs with them, or watch Frozen with them one more time, I’ll be saying yes instad of dismissing them with my usual “I can’t, I’m too busy, I’ve got too much to do…”.

Because the one that stands out the most to me on this new list is definitely the first one: Be present.

That’s something I’ve been working on a lot this year and I have the feeling that this Christmas is when I’m going to notice that all my hard work has paid off.  I hope so anyway.

I’d love to find out your thoughts on this alternative Christmas to-do list, so please do leave a comment below.  Feel free to share this post with anyone you think might find it useful too.  Thanks for reading 🙂