Does Christmas leave you feeling heavy hearted?

For some the season leaves feelings of heavy hearted frustration and loneliness. Are you one of them? It seems that we all construct artificial measurements of how sucessful we are in life, such as who we have in our life during the holidays and how sucessful that relationship is. I'm not speaking just of a spouse or lover, but of children, grandchildren, and friends. If we feel we're being forced into dutiful celebrations we'd rather avoid, or that we must be with people we'd rather forget we know, we won't be happy.

If that feeling has come over you this year, what can you do? Can you change your traditional celebrations in mid stream? Some have left their hometown for a trip to an exotic place right at Christmas time and thus avoided all the hoopla. That is one altenative.

You can always go along to get along and be miserable.

What if you actively work to change the pattern to something you like better. Instead of going to Uncle Ned's where you have little control, maybe you can have a celebration at your home where you can have control. You might also narrow down the list of people a little that way. Instead of ham for dinner, you might prefer turkey or even lasagna. It's your house so you can fix whatever you want.

For next year, I plan to change the pattern a little and forget about the role of tradition. I hope you'll consider that too.