Welcoming the ghosts of your Christmas past and future.

I’ve just taken down the decorations from the main tree, the dead spindly spines brittle and brutal to my touch, the smell of nature and pine dwindled to dust. But enough poetic nostalgia. I hate the fucking lights. The only thing worse than twisting them through the tree is wrangling them off the tree.  Not only does it physically hurt, those fiesty fine pines poking my skin, it feels like a let down, a painful job with no gain - other than to get the dusty, dead, spindly tree out of my house. 

But lights aside, the whole taking down of the tree makes me feel all the feelings. As I curse and cradle my punctured hand, I feel sad. And glad. And wistful and wishful. Happy and home-warmed, lost and languished. 

I can hear the ghosts of laughter and family still lingering in the January-dark-dead room, the vim of valiant optimism from just weeks before when I had struggled my stretched arms around the new vibrant branches for another festive season of family and food and fun, and now its cold and dark and months before it all comes out again. 

One of my favourite days of the year is the day the fresh Christmas tree arrives, the smell of forest filling the kitchen. Since my marriage ended nine years ago, I’ve made it a mission to make this a meaningful family day with my girls. Ten years ago, putting up the tree with my increasingly estranged husband had broken my heart, my marriage just weeks to live. 

This next Christmas with just me and the girls, we put on Home Alone, I made hot chocolates, and we unpacked the box of treasures, so many of them with stories of their own. Every year we would take a trip into Dublin’s big fancy shop to see the lights and each pick out a new decoration; fairies, glittering donuts, sparkly penguins, whatever delighted them that year. So every pine-fresh decorating day, they would be unpacked, memories mingling with meaning. As I rebuilt my new family, my original family would always visit, harder after my mum died, but still wonderful. And as I always took down the tree I’d be left feeling bereft it was all over. 

The nostalgia, the love, the longing, the hope, the grief, the relief, a smorgasbord of feelings when my battery was at its lowest. 

But it’s one of those annual markers when I get to compare my year to the last, and wonder about the next.  Because it happens every year, it presents the perfect point of reflection. It’s a strange moment when several selves slip out of me so there are many versions of me doing this same task, but at different times of life.

Me as a young child in our old house helping my mum decorate as Kings College Choir plays carols on the cassette tape, her telling me the stories of her own childhood Christmases, me not able to see yet one of her split selves handing her father a red shiny bauble to hang up high as her current self takes one from my little hand.

Me as a teenager in our new house helping my mum decorate as Madonna sings Like a Virgin on Top of the Pop in the background and I hum the word virgin as if it is a naughty word despite the fact that it was sung countless times by the carol singers of earlier years. 

All those years as a child helping my mum decorate the Christmas trees and all these years with my kids helping me decorate the Christmas tress, and all the years in between when I sometimes decorated my own sparse tree in sparse rented flats… all the me’s who have decorated trees, and all the phases and stages of my life, repeated and replayed on this day every year, selves slipping out so I feel like an accordion of images. 

And with each year the family changes. As I took down my lights this year, I wondered will my dad still be with me next year? Will I wait to hear his car on the gravel and sigh with relief he made it safely. Or will next year as I hang the lights, my teenagers no longer interested in Home Alone and hanging sparkly donuts, will I retreat into the safer past selves when my families where all complete?

And what about the future selves… what can I do to ensure my future selves are bringing down the tree lights with no regrets, when there aren’t as many people coming, or different people and the shape and size of my family has changed.  When I have changed. Because that’s the reason those slipping selves can emerge,… each of us has so many. We are changed every year. And perhaps we forget how much we will change. 

We’re told to live in the present, but it’s only relevant if we show respect to the past and attention to the future. 

Which is why I’m such a fan of journaling, of reflecting, of joining the dots, of making sense, of seeing reason, of reasoning, and sometimes placing the dots for the future so that the joined up pieces make a picture we are pleased with when perhaps the last tree lights are taken down. 

It’s hard to imagine the future. But when coaching, I often ask women to look back and see just how far they’ve come, how much they’ve accomplished, how much they’ve overcome, to help them make sense of what can be. Only when they check back in to really reflect on how much they have grown, learned, evolved, changed, can they grasp how much they still can, and will, grow, learn, evolve, change. The things we think we aren’t capable of now, could well be things we are capable of in the future.  How often do we look at people and wonder how they manage? Or how they accomplished something? Or how they changed? I suspect none of them knew they could until they did, or had to. 

It’s easy at various stages of midlife to feel stagnated, that life will always feel the way it does now. So seeing your past selves is really important for honouring and living for your future selves. 

Who do you need to be today, and tomorrow and next year to give the woman standing at this tree in five years, ten years, 20 years the life you’d want for her?

Journaling and being really connected to past, present and future selves means you get to be dynamic not static… to trace how you have changed to see how you can change. 

This year, as I untangled the Christmas tree lights a few weeks ago, smiling and smelling the new pine leaves, I realised the joy of the day was less exciting for the girls than it used to be. Now two teens and one adult, they barely looked at Home Alone, and the twinkle of their phone screens drew their attention more than gaudy baubles they chose in years past. I realised I won’t always be a single mum, they won’t always be here when I put up the tree. What will my life look like then? 

My card from a recent Christmas past

And because I know the power of planning (while very much appreciating the present) I know it will be different but hopefully not worse. Once they’ve all gone, and after I’ve slept for a full month to recover from 25 years of parenting, I want to travel with my coaching and speaking work, write more books (basically do what I do now but with a tan and a lot less laundry).  What do my current selves need to do to make sure my future selves can do that? How do I make that happen? 

It also makes me really appreciate that although it can feel really hard right now, this time will pass, far quicker than I likely want.  So I am intentional about making an effort to appreciate it, including the sullen looks and lack of interest, because I know that in some future moments, they will be decorating a Christmas tree, and a past self will slip out and stand beside them, and they will be here with me, decorating my tree while they also now decorate their own.

Reflection helps us keep connected to our past selves, present self and future selves…. Makes us feel less lonely with all those selves jostling for attention, makes us remember we are dynamic, not static, and that we have agency to keep placing the dots from which we will create the picture of our life. 

From next week, for paid subscribers, I’ll be launching my Midlife redefined, Journal.  It will follow the same pathway as my self-guided book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter, so it will take you through a process of self-discovery, then planning, and then action, in two six-month cycles.  It won’t be date specific so can be started any time of the year.  Every month will include a short introduction to set the context for the reflection work, and every two weeks I’ll be posting 14 prompts to help you reflect and build that connection with your past, present and future selves. 

We talk a lot about finding the balance in our lives, but I heard recently a much better word: harmony.  Journalling really helps you to find harmony with the struggles and joys, the challenges and the opportunities, the past and the future, the now and the then, the love and the loss, the growth and the disappointment… and all the wonderful ways in which our lives meander. 

I’m off now to carry the heavy boxes and bags of Christmas decorations to the attic, a hideous job but one in which many of my past selves will join me in a sweaty, sweary, dance. 

Happy new year.

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If you’d like to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can manage things differently, you can book a one hour 1:1 Discovery Coaching Session with me where you get to think about you, how to manage this life you are living, and invest some time and thought on you. Radical idea that, is it? To invest some time and thought on you? Details are here. 

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