yesterday i asked you to email and tell me what you are NOT doing this year, in order to avoid being overwhelmed and protect your sobriety. holy, i got a lot of diverse and super interesting answers. the magic number winner of the european chocolate is (appropriately) H: “I’m giving up ‘counting calories that I eat’. I’ve got this app on my phone and it tells me how much money, calories & days I’ve saved from not drinking. After just two days I was amazed! I haven’t looked at the app for a few days now, but it’s made me realise that whatever I was consuming in alcohol, was massive in calories. I’m going to enjoy guilt free eating.”
what else are we giving up this month? Roadtosoberville (day 756): “Good morning Belle! This year I am giving up Xmas gifts for colleagues and staff. Year after year I’ve spent hundreds of dollars that I don’t have and loads of time on people at work, out of some sort of weird sense of ‘I should’. This year if I do anything at all, it will be an inexpensive card. I’m also taking two weeks’ vacation. The last and only time I’ve done that with this job was for my honeymoon! While my brain still wants chaos and overwhelm, I am slowly learning how to stop the self imposed madness! Big hugs!” She’s not the only one who is going to stop buying gifts for all the work colleagues. (and if it was me, instead of cards, i’d just take in cookies one day and call it done.)
and now that you mention cookies, there’s this from andpops (day 136): “I’m going to minimally decorate for Christmas. A smaller tree than usual. Fewer decorations around the house. Skip the stockings this year. I’m also going to skip the rolled-out, iced cookies, and go for your shortbread cookie recipe :)” If you didn’t get the recipe, send me an email with what you think the only 3 ingredients are, and i’ll reply with the secret recipe.
speaking of which, i haven’t done any christmas baking yet. we don’t get our tree until the 15th (tradition). it’s a weird thing, maybe only in france? but the christmas trees are very expensive, therefore small, and they are NOT watered. you buy the lovely little tree nailed to a wooden x-stand thing, and then you not only can’t water it, but no one does… how they keep them more than 10 days i have no idea as they’ve been on sale already for weeks. any other countries where you don’t water your trees? in canada we certain did, regularly, the fear of a dry-tree-fire was drilled into us. here? apparently not. though the days of lights that heat up are gone, so maybe the fire risk with LED lights … i have no idea. just rambling now. drinking my decaf + hot chocolate mixture… other sober treat ideas here.
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this is ‘exit’ in french. exit the booze elevator. it’s an elevator that only goes down. time to step off.
link
original art link here.