1). Every year I say this, but I’m going to cut down the Christmas cards dramatically. I used to love choosing and sending them, and now it’s just become an awful chore. So I’m planning to send everyone one last one next year explaining that I’m stopping doing them, and giving everyone my email address to keep in touch by email instead. Then, in subsequent years, I plan to only send them to about 20 close friends and my relatives who actually bother sending nice ones back. I think once they are reduced to around 20 I’ll actually enjoy choosing and writing them again, and then I can buy and send really nice cards if I want!
2.) I’m not going to do cards or presents for all of DP’s family. At the moment he doesn’t give a rat’s arse about doing them, but it’s me who runs around buying, wrapping, packing and posting all his family cards plus presents for all his cousins’ children and so on. It makes me stressed and annoyed and neither he nor they ever seem to be particularly grateful. So that’s going. If he wants to do them he will have to do them himself!
3.) I also spend the year looking for and choosing nice things for all of my family, and then I have to store a ton of presents in our teeny house for ages, stress about wrapping them and getting them posted etc. This coming year everyone’s getting something ordered online, a voucher, money in a card or something sent and wrapped by Amazon. As with the cards, I used to enjoy picking and wrapping gifts for Christmas, but I’m fed up of the stress and bother at the moment. I dream of sitting down one day in November and ordering everything to be delivered from M&S or similar!
4.) Fewer presents for DD, and now she’s getting older I am going to stop buying things in the sales and throughout the year, and just buy a few more expensive items closer to the time instead. Sick of having boxes of presents cluttering up the house and having to be hidden during the year. She’ll be a teenager next year, and so it’s not as easy to buy in advance as it used to be. And I plan to get fewer but more expensive stocking presents, too. I’ll put some money away each month instead of stockpiling. This year we also asked family for vouchers/money or token edible gifts and that worked really well too - no weird gifts that needed to be shunted off to the charity shop and everyone was happy!
5.) Our food orders were relatively streamlined this year and all worked pretty well — though I twitched and bought a last minute pre-cooked ham in Waitrose that turned out not to be very nice, despite being very expensive. So I won’t be doing that again. But instead of stressing about a M&S food order as in previous years, this year we ordered a really good quality free range chicken from the local farm shop instead of turkey, and just went for plain carrots, savoy cabbage and sprouts (for DD who loves them), roasties, and pigs in blankets, but nothing else. And it was all ready for us to pick up from the farm shop on the 23rd with no mad queues! For pudding we ordered a Yule log from a local bakery and again that was expensive but worth it, really nice and far less stress than a Christmas pudding nobody likes. We had exactly the right amount of food, enough for a second dinner the following day and no more, which was perfect and no wastage. So we’ll be doing that again - plus cooking a ham instead of pre-buying one.
6.) We went to a lights trail that was excellent, a nice carol concert, and did a few low-key Christmassy things that I’d do again next year. This year we didn’t try to fit in a trip to see a show or a ballet which overall made things a lot less stressful (and less expensive!) so I think we’ll stick to this again next year.
So far then, that’s my notes for next year!