@Karen – what a list! I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s too. I’m glad you found my books and writing!

I plan to do the time-tracking challenge this year too. College classes resume on 1/9 and 1/10 is my dear friend’s book launch and I’ll probably sleep over there to make things simpler so it’ll be a *very* unusual week to track!

Be glad you don’t live in the southern hemisphere, where Christmas celebrations coincide with the end of the school year, resulting in one big stressful mess! The confluence of these two major events meant that December for me was filled with:

– Self-publishing Miss 12’s comics into a book because doing that means we have unique presents to give to family, friends and teachers.

– Putting up the tree and decorations

– Doing advent calendar readings with my kids over breakfast

– Making Christmas cards (because I dislike the ones in the store and I also needed some for work and for my kids to give out )

– Putting together lolly bags for my kids to give to their friends along with the Christmas cards. (Chocolate melts in the Australian sun!)

– Organising, purchasing and wrapping Christmas gifts for family and extended family, as well as for some of my work colleagues. (Ugh, I’ve spent around three hours wrapping gifts this week and I’m still not done!)

– Organising the gifts and printing the cards with messages from the class for Miss 12’s three teachers because I was class parent this year. (I didn’t know she would have three teachers when I signed up to be class parent :S)

– Miss 12 was finishing primary school, which meant that we attended the musical her year group put on, she attended a farewell dinner and dance (which meant going on an outing to buy her new shoes as she only had sneakers in her current size), and attending covert dance rehearsals in the weeks leading up to the end of term as the tradition at the school is that the parents of the graduating year do a dance flashmob at the graduation assembly. (The dancing turned out to be more fun than I was expecting, even though the routine was a little more complicated than I would have liked!)

– Family Christmas get-togethers (we do for scattered throughout December to cater to all branches of the extended family)

– Work Christmas party, for which I (perhaps very foolishly) volunteered to perform a song as part of the proceedings (singing and playing piano). Fortunately I’ve been practising that all year!

– Doing a neighbourhood letter box drop to advertise the Christmas services and carols at church.

– Rehearsals for church carols, which also meant learning a low and high harmony line for “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, as well as a part for glockenspiel for “Joy to the World”. (NB: I’ve never played glockenspiel before this!)

– Making egg nog for my husband as it’s the only time of year I do that for him

– Knitting a “Bee & Puppycat” hat for a friend’s child because that friend asked me to do it as she wanted to give it to her child for Christmas. (She bought me the yarn though!)

It’s two more days until Christmas, work is over (we have a compulsory shut down between Christmas and New Year’s), the days are heating up (it’s expected to be 30ºC over the weekend), and I’m so glad that the bulk of the above is over!

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s. Thank you for all your thoughts and writing on time management things; I have benefitted greatly from them. I am in the middle of one of your books at the moment and am hoping to finish it while on holidays 🙂

@CB – here’s to a healthy Christmas! And I get it on the tree. Ours won’t come down until new years I’m sure but it does feel like a fresh start when it does.

We fly tomorrow which was not a certainty until 5pm when we did a final covid test and I’m negative, my husband has the faintest of squinters, and kiddo is negative (never tested positive). It’s been a stressful week, but luckily we had pretty mild cases for our first covid rodeo. We did an early Christmas celebration to avoid hauling gifts, which was nice, glad we had a supply of Lego and books to keep us going this week. My son missed two Christmas parties but enjoyed mummy school, full on March 2020 vibes. He’s made tons of progress with his reading this week though, think he needed the individualised attention.

My family is currently grumbling about my plans to take the tree down tomorrow am but I find it depressing to come home to a sad tree (it’s a real one and we bought it from the farm in early December so we’ve had time to enjoy it. But I just think new year, nice fresh start.