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The long January holidays are sometimes depressing. To avoid sadness and emptiness, use these simple ways to please yourself and others. They do not require large financial costs: all you need is your desire to make life a little brighter and more interesting.
Of course, we can’t get back everything we lost last year. But we are able, using 6 simple ideas, to make the holidays full of meaning, to give happiness to ourselves and others, even those who see us only online.
1.Give gifts from the heart
If you have not yet congratulated all relatives, friends and relatives on the New Year, give them gifts made by yourself. For example, there is nothing more beautiful and more expensive than the drawings that children have drawn. Pebbles or shells from the sea can also be a fun gift and a promise for future travels.
But if you do not know how to draw, knit, write poetry or sew plush toys and there is no sea or forest nearby, to find cones and pebbles there, make a “box of memories” or a magic bottle. You can put old photographs in the box, small postcards in which you will tell your loved one why you love him.
And the bottle can be filled with neatly folded pieces of paper, on which it is written what you like in a friend or relative, or warm New Year wishes are left. It is a hundred times more pleasant to receive such a gift than a bull figurine bought in a store.
2. Write to those who changed your life
A classmate advised you to go to the sports section, and since then you have been going there twice a week for two years now? Did your teacher teach you to love literature, and did you eventually enter the philological faculty?
On the path of life, we meet people who change us, inspire us, help us discover something in ourselves that we did not know about before. New Year’s holidays are a great occasion to write to them and say “thank you”. Let them have long forgotten about you, but you remember them.
Believe me, they will be pleased to know that there is at least one person in this world whose life they have changed for the better.
3. Diversify your leisure time
If you don’t have a lot of money, try to come up with something cool or magical from improvised materials to diversify your leisure time during the holidays.
For example, you can bake cookies that kids love. Wrap it in foil and hide it in different secret corners of the apartment. And then draw a map, and let the children look for all your “secrets”. Or prepare funny medals, and then arrange a game: make short words from one long one – and hand them over to the winners.
4. Try to get to know each other more
Play a game of questions and answers. Write questions on cards and turn them over so that your loved one – even if you communicate via video – cannot read the text. Let him do the same. Draw the cards one by one. And then answer the questions as honestly as possible. For example, ask questions like:
- Was there a moment in your life when you wanted to change your life dramatically?
- What do you think an ideal world should be like? Name one thing you can do to make it so.
- What qualities are most important to you in yourself and in others?
- Is there a feeling that you have been hiding for a long time, but now you are ready to share it?
5.Green your life
Try to find the positives in financial constraints. We are finally freed from the temptation to sweep everything from the windows and can be conscious about consumption.
Make your own decorations from cones, cookies and threads. Prepare for the holidays local cuisine prepared with seasonal ingredients. And also sort out your wardrobe: leave only what you really are going to wear, give the rest to those in need or send it for recycling. By getting rid of everything unnecessary in the house, we get rid of what burdens, and our own soul.
6. Say “thank you” to those who helped you
Perhaps in the past year you had to go through a lot of unpleasant moments. But for sure there were people who helped you, supported you with a kind word or money, advice or action.
Maybe food was brought to you or you were amused by video so that you would not be sad alone. Thank those who made it! If there is no one to thank in person, think of all those who have worked to keep you alive. About doctors and nurses, about couriers and cooks, about actors who played online for you, about trainers who arranged free workouts.
Thank them mentally or with a social media post.
Remember Dickens’ story “A Christmas Carol”? What conclusions did Scrooge draw? Wealth and health do not always make us happy, but love and generosity always do. Take good care of yourself and those you love. Remember that kindness, generosity, attention can bring us pleasure and joy even in the darkest days.