Choices

Much of our life comes down to choices. Where should we live, who should we marry, how many children should we have. Now these are certainly life changing choices. Sometimes, though, it is the smaller choices that give me the most trouble.

Since FTD, making choices is one of the most difficult things for me to do some days. Where would I like to go? What would I like to do? What shall I make for dinner. These choices are certainly not life altering, but definitely will make a difference in making my day to day life as comfortable and calm as possible.

I am finally learning to make some choices that I recognize just might make my life with FTD a little easier. For instance, decorating my home for all the holidays. Yes, I tend to get carried away and have multiple totes full of decorations for every holiday. This year, during Halloween season, I was busy and feeling down a lot of the days. My choice then was to not decorate the house. I put something up on the two exterior doors to great those who visited and pulled a my Halloween table runners out of the totes. That was it. Amazingly, the holiday still came and I was still ready for trick or treaters and the house still seemed somewhat seasonal.

Once I realized the world had indeed not come to an end, I did the same thing for Thanksgiving and just grabbed a few things out of the several totes for that holiday. Once I put the real turkey on the table, no one cared and I didn't feel like a total failure.

So, along comes the BIG one! I have at least six full size totes of decorations, plus one of lights and one extra large one of tree decorations and a second extra large one full of larger decorations for out on the porch. I am not even counting the one tote full of Christmas shirts and sweaters or box with the tree itself. (Yes, I use a fake tree. Helps, since I'm allergic to real ones.) There's also a wreath stored under the bed. I am sure you get the picture. Yes, I love holidays and making them special for my family and friends.

All this led up to a big choice. How much to decorate for Christmas? I asked my daughter if we needed the tree up. Her response was an immediate "Yes!" She will be arriving here on the 23rd, so she offered that we could decorate the tree on Christmas Eve. Uh, no. If I am going to put it up, I want to enjoy it for the whole month. So the tree stays. Determined to force myself to cut back, I only asked my husband to bring up the tree, the decorations, the decorations for the porch, my large nativity set and what I normally put on the mantle. That is only two of the regular sized totes, the rest are still in the garage. I made the choice and I stuck to it.

What amazes me is that the house still looks well decorated with only about half of my usual stuff. Plus, there is the added bonus of not having as many things for my grand"kitties" to knock down.

The other wise choice I made was to not try to do it all in one day. My husband helped me decorate the outside on Friday. Saturday, I put out most of the decorations, except my big nativity set which I set out on Sunday. Hmm... rather appropriate to do that on a Sunday. Plus I assembled the tree. Tomorrow, I will decorate the tree.

I have also convinced myself to use some gift bags instead of decoratively wrapping all the gifts. Most will go in bags, with a couple wrapped ones for each person.  Today, when assembling the tree and putting the top decoration on, my husband was making "helpful" suggestions on what I could do to make it just a little better. I told him that it doesn't have to be 100% perfect, we can accept 80%. Then I realized, I needed to believe that too. I think I am well on my way to accepting that.

After all the decorating, will come the cookie baking.  Nope, not cutting back on that. I get so much pleasure out of sharing my cookies with family and friends. I will stretch it out to more days, but not cut back. Fortunately, most of them freeze well, so I don't have to worry about making them too soon.

I think I have made a lot of good choices for the holidays. I am darned proud of myself... finally learning to respect the limitations that FTD puts on me. It is much easier to embrace them than it is to fight them!