Stress Free or In Denial?

 

It's sometimes very easy in retirement to relax and lose track of time. Add that recent sunshine trip  into the mix and some might say I've reclined so far back into my metaphorical deck chair that I've entered a world of denial. Were you to ask me today's date I might struggle a little, save to say that I'm aware it is just before Christmas. How do I even know that? Well picking up the eldest and Dilly from the railway station this morning with a similar rendezvous arranged for the youngest later this evening might have something to do with it.

Christmas visitors are here. There is no obvious stress permeating my being. Could everything be so well organised and planned that I'm ahead of myself?

Sadly not, denial it definitely is and a feeling of floating on a higher plane, looking down and thinking no day in the year is ever worth getting frazzled over. Hence, this week I've been back into the gym, adding on a swim and spa; I've had a morning of strength training and Pilates followed by a watercolour class. This morning I made a token gesture by whizzing round with the vaccum cleaner before going to the train station to fulfil my taxi duties and then, visitors or not, I confess I disappeared to a sketching class, booked before I realised which day they were arriving (just in case you think I'm totally insensitive and unsociable).

No we haven't yet got the key Christmas dinner ingredients sorted and with an apparent shortage of turkeys, we might yet be going down the toad in the hole route. At least the shops never empty of Brussels sprouts, and if they do, I still have a few in the garden along with mounds of chard! After all it's only Wednesday, far too early to be worrying about what we are all going to eat on Sunday.

I'm quietly confident that present shopping is complete after spending a morning online last weekend and calling into the local department store en route to visit my mother and late enough in the day that most shoppers had disappeared. Moreover and in a nod to festive spirit, I even erected and decorated a tree on Monday evening. I wrote out the few cards that I still send whilst on La Gomera and posting them on our return, safe in the knowledge that they won't be delivered until January in any event as a consequence of strike action. Christmas has never felt so easy. Whether that will still be the case after I've fought with the roll of sticky tape wrapping parcels, I'm not sure but then, come to think of it, I might abandon the tape and use only string; better for the planet and for a continuation of my state of calm and refutation.

I'm also trying to engender a similar disposition of peace and harmony across the family with a Christmas jigsaw, allowing my visitors to sidle in and add a piece as the fancy takes. It's potential therapy for myself too, should I awake in the morning and suddenly feel under alarming pressure, and that's from somebody who normally doesn't have the patience for and struggles to see the point in such puzzles!

If I weren't feeling so serene and tranquil, I might be panicking that my composure is symptomatic of some kind of dreadful illness that begins with a feeling of detachment. Fortunately my powers of empathy were tested at the station this morning when I found myself smiling at the delight I felt watching a family greet a long lost relative who was clearly a Christmas visitor. It reminded me of that occasion when I'd ended up in floods of tears watching another family wave off their adult son from the same railway platform. I was convinced he was heading off to fight a foreign war, only for them to confide in me that they wouldn't be seeing him for 3 long weeks because he was going on a safari! People-watching at transport hubs has so much to recommend it, especially when you bring a dose of imagination to help the observations along.

Is there a secret to my poise and imperturbability?  It's my ninth Christmas of retirement and I'd like to think we are not simply sleepwalking into it but instead have finally learnt how to peel back the layers and simplify on so many levels. 

Less is more when it comes to plans and preparations; snuggling down with close family and valuing our time together rather than pursuing a complex and ambitious agenda of entertainment and decorations. A tree and a few fairy lights rather than the illuminations with which so many neighbouring homes are decked. Agreeing to cut back on gift exchanges with the wider family, a policy we instated a few years ago, has certainly dispelled much of the traumatic build up to 25th December reducing the shopping, wrapping and delivery arrangements. That holiday just over a week ago has put us into a dream-like aura and the ability to exercise, paint and do what I enjoy without feeling a need to be running around madly trying to create the perfect Christmas, is worth more than the trappings we've failed to adopt.

Our joy comes from getting together once again as a family, foibles and all, with nobody really interested in exquisite table accessories, displays of finely arranged greenery or scented candles. This is Christmas at home not in a hotel, evoking nostalgia and moments from all our Christmases past whilst creating the opportunity for fresh fun together.