A stressful December?

There were a lot of big plans for December blog posts in late November. One was to be about green natural decorations for your house and garden. How to put together wreaths, mantelpiece swathes and other beauties from Ivy and found plant materials. Another post was to be about Scandinavian paper Christmas decorations for the tree, such as woven hearts and something frilly that translates as a Christmas tree sweet or Christmas tree cracker.

But somehow those posts did not get written. We moved into our new extension early in the month and we had grossly underestimated the amount of work involved. Everything in our combined living and bed room had to be moved out, sorted through and made to find new spaces in the extension. The recently vacated mottled green room was not to our teenage girls liking. It also looked a bit worse for wear so had to be painted; ceiling, walls, shelves, radiator, window frames etc… Everything needed two or three coats of paint. Now it is a dream in Venetian white and a grey-blue colour called Robin egg. The girls are happily moved in but to get them to help out with the room they until recently shared with their sister is a different story. Three teenage girls can accumulate a huge amount of stuff and now all of that needs to be sorted through and moved before that room can be painted and decorated for the remaining inhabitant.

We also had five big crates residing in the kitchen full of the stuff taken off a shelving unit we had to move out in order to build the walkway through to the extension. They were very much in the way in our small kitchen and are now in the process of slowly being sorted through. So to make a long story short, almost everything in the house is being moved around. It is like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are hard to find and even harder to put together.

December can be a stressful month at the best of times, but all of the above in combination with all the holiday must do’s and should do’s has made this past few weeks quite difficult. Slowly the tension has been building up and time has been slipping through our fingers, disappearing fast. And at the back of our minds the thoughts have been gnawing away, we must find time for the blog posts, and time to write the Christmas cards and time to find the Jamie Oliver Recipe cards for the Christmas dinner, and time for this and time for that until there has been no time to enjoy anything anymore.

It was high time to put on the big brakes. How much fun is Christmas with six grumpy, tired and irritable individuals? So now we are relaxing as much as possible. We had an evening together last week and dressed the tree. It will be the only decoration in our house, but we are ok with that. The room that needs painting will still be there after the holidays, and so will most of the mess in the house and all the weeds in the garden, but does it really matter? Is it good to have cleaned sparkling windows but no time to sit down and talk to each other? Is an hour spent cleaning worth more than an hour visiting a lonely neighbour or a friend? We might still make some paper decorations for the tree and write about it here but only because it is fun and not because we have to.