Keeping it festive

I appreciate that we're firmly in February 2016 but a friend asked me to write about this so I am. Please accept my apologies for dipping back into Christmas now.

Christmas inspires mixed feelings. There are those who love Christmas so go all out for it. And there are those who wish it away. For me Christmas can be a weird time and I think a lot of that stems from growing up with separated parents. I was about 4 or 5 when they split and it's had a pretty lasting effect on my life.

When it comes to Christmas, I've had the good, the bad, and the ugly. So for 2015 I wanted to make it especially good. Possibly even great. So the first thing I wanted to do before December began was establish what exactly that would involve. This was around the time I also began getting back into Pinterest, that devil of a website.

Given that Andy and me have been together for 3 years now I felt it was about time that we started setting down the traditions that we would carry forward every year. Traditions that would stick or change as we grow old together. For me that meant creating our own advent calendar of festive activities.

I'd like to say at this point, god bless Andy Vine. He puts up with my obsessing over ideas and notions with little complaint. He doesn't always get involved but he doesn't tell me to stop going on about things either.

I fretted over the right advent calendar. I fretted over the activities. I fretted over when we'd do the activities. I fretted about everything I could possibly fret about. But it got done. I bought an advent calendar that we could insert our own activities and of course chocolates into. One night before December began, we sat down and wrote them all down, placing them into the correct dates, and sneaking some spare chocolates as we went. It was lovely.

Now we didn't have activities planned for every day because we had other things going on. And there were days where I didn't get chance to get a photo of what we were actually doing. I took a photo of each activity I'd written down though.

As you can probably imagine, the advent activities I planned made for an exhausting December. I don't think we stopped once throughout the whole month. We were either doing or planning or organising. It made our Christmas break all that more welcome. But we did have a wonderful Christmas. I think my favourite thing about our advent activities was the amount of people who said how much they were enjoying following what we were getting up to. So many of our friends and family expressed their enjoyment of our antics. 

I'm massively looking forward to adapting our activities for Christmas 2016 and going through this madness all over again.