A little Christmas magic ...

The semester's teaching is done. I'm in a sweet lull between the last day of class and when my students submit their final writing portfolios, so no grading to see here (yet...). I had a wonderful weekend of cooking and baking and jigsaw puzzling and brunching with a good friend. 

In short, I'm relaxed. And loving it. 

I'm surprised, frankly, that I was able to relax so quickly. Between fall break (my last vacation) and this past week, I've been traveling too much for my taste, grinding late into the night just to keep my head above water with work, not cleaning my house, and just generally not getting to do the kinds of things at the kind of pace that keeps me feeling balanced and centered.

How did I get to this week of peace?

One of the best things I did this week is go by feel. I was at a fantastic conference this past weekend, Medievalists Design Games (the subject of a future blog post?), and before I left I needed to do a brain dump of the massive to-dos in my life. But that to-do list was so overwhelming that I couldn’t even look at it. I ended up going through it all by feel, chipping away day by day until by Friday I had pretty much all the mundane stuff done (get the car oil changed, catch up on email, finish up a work project that had been dangling over my head) and I was able to spend most of my weekend baking cookies and making chicken pot pie and writing Christmas cards and hanging greenery around the house. And during no part of this week did I feel frenetic. A little Christmas magic!

Try it for yourself! Especially if, like me, you're an HSP.

I wish you peace and ease this holiday season, whatever and however you observe it.

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Image by Monika from Pixabay.