What are your top tips for surviving the Christmas season?

Please yourself, not everyone else. If there are people you cannot stand and don't see all year around, why should you be expected to be in their company at Christmas, make your excuses and stay away.

I did this for the first time last year because I was sick to death of arguments and relatives who I do not get on with being forced upon me, every Christmas I can remember has been ruined in some way or another because of this. I made a stand and said that me and my son would be staying at home and having Christmas there, we did and it was brilliant. It didn't go down well but who cares, we had a nice time and that is the most important thing.

Staying clear of relatives is the best way to survive the holidays! LOL

I try to remind myself that, while I have no family at all, someone loves me. And that love (not family) is really what Christmas is all about.

i help the wife with cooking. have tons of fun with the kids, and in laws.dress up as santa for friends and family, eat lots of junk, buy loud toys,,,,,oh ho ho.

ONE TIP WHICH MAY MAKE YOUR CHRISTMAS EASIER... THE CORE LIST

Are those your hands I see pressed against your forehead? It must be just about Christmastime! This can be a wild season for just about everything except the (re)birth of Jesus Christ. Out come the wallets, out come the lists (looooooong lists), get me a couple of aspirin or a gin and tonic and I think we're ready to hop on the horse and nail the big day! (maybe a Harvey's Bristol Cream...)

Seriously, in the United States it is a mass exodus to the malls, complete with mounded shopping carts, no place to park, the necessary headache and of course - insufficient funds (don't remind me)... which may not be the best way to begin to celebrate. With so much emphasis upon giving and getting, I often wonder where Christ went in all of this, back up on the mountain, perhaps? To hide?

I also study article after article on how to survive it all and come out in one piece in January of the new year. But - BUT.... there is one thing I have never seen mentioned.

Our Christmas card lists. (Finally, someone is writing about this.)

Every year we add three or four people. Our card list gets longer and longer every year. How do you prune it down to size? How to make it manageable? Let's take a closer look: you have 85 people to send cards this year. Your hand will drop off from writing all those cards longhand. Ask me how I know. It is said if you have more than a hundred people to send cards to you're already in over your head.

Here is a way to trim that growing Christmas card list without feeling guilty or cheap. Make what I call a "core list" of names. The "core list" will include people you truly would love to send a card. My core list is about ten to twelve people. This is always a fun list to do. I grab a red felt marker and all kinds of cards and it might take me two sessions of writing (at 66 years old), but I can usually get them all done in one sitting. There. The core list is done. Put on the stamps and out they go, or you can find a small wicker basket and save all your cards so they all go out at once. What I have been doing in our family for years is to create and prepare this core list. Then, of course, I make tea. Very hot tea with honey and skim milk. I sip the tea and study that short little core list. It might need changing or tweaking before I begin writing the cards - a name dropped; a name added...

Now, here comes the good part: after that core list has been done and the cards have stamps on them ready to go, I can relax. I can now pick and choose any name from the rest of names on the longer list and send as I wish, to my heart's content, until December 24 and beyond. With the core list finished, I am free to write one or two cards additionally or maybe fifty, depending upon my mood and inclination.

Having that core list done (and for me, in the mail) frees me from "the duty part" of sending Christmas cards each year. It really helps to pick people you love to send cards to as the ones on the core list. One year I deliberately picked twenty people I really would just like to get it over with, to send cards to them, and that left me feeling free, as well. Because the difficult folks had all been remembered... now I could start to have some fun, &c. Doing the balance of the cards was - cozy.

Creating and doing a core list frees you so you do not feel shackled to that gigantic card list starting the first thing of the Christmas season each year. I often use the very cards we receive as a kind of guide to whom I will be sending cards next... there is a kind of flowing pattern which gets set up as the season unfolds, with cards coming in, cards going out, and before you know it, Christmas has arrived and the race is won for another year. (And I can forget about card lists completely.)

I offer this idea to help people like myself who just do not know who should be "cut" from the Christmas card list. You know as well as I do, if you try that one what will happen is the first fifteen cards you receive and put up on your mantelpiece in the living room will be (that's right) from all the people you just cut from your list - ! All fifteen people will come out of the woodwork with their Christmas wishes and cards. Without fail it will happen. You just know it. It is also helpful to prepare that core list before the Christmas season kicks in (starts) in December.

I usually have my own core list finished very near Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Once the Christmas season starts, forget it. You will be over-doing everything just as always, and your brains will have gone out the window. Our hearts will have stepped in, right on cue. That's because that's what we all do. Make a promise to yourself this year to try to show some good sense with your pocketbook, and keep spending within reason. (sigh... )

I hope you have gotten some thoughts about all this while reading my rambly little narrative, here.