Welcome to the second of our guest posts from Valerie at the curious, scrumptiously beautiful, blog that is A Bohemian Season…
Starting Anew At Home After A Long Holiday
I am returning at last from a long vacation – two weeks on the beautiful island of Hawai’i. The very word vacation is interesting… to vacate, to be vacant. If you imbibe a certain cocktail called “a coconut adrift” you will know exactly what this means. Vacation is a time when you leave your normal life and drift on new winds untethered. But coming back from a vacation is a strange time, suddenly stepping back into that world you had vacated.
It is a time when life’s rituals and routines are interrupted and suddenly you find yourself at a loss, having to restart them all again. It is much like that hazy time just after Thanksgiving and Christmas – when you wake feeling bloated and slow and the house is still full of Christmas
So I’ve come back with fresh eyes. My home and my regular life almost seems foreign to me. My routines – once second nature – must be rebuilt one by one. And now, weeks after the rest of the world, it seems I finally feel the New Year – that zest and energy, that drive to remake my life.
There is laundry to be done and receipts to be filed, and yet what I long to do is stroll through my house and take advantage of those fresh eyes, pruning and cleaning and fixing things up. I want to dig into Alison’s Trash or Treasure program. I want to make my home just as lovely and tidy and luxurious to stay in as a hotel with smooth sheets and piles of terrycloth towels. I want to throw out the clothes that made me feel frumpy when I look at vacation photos. I want to whip up a fresh set of uber healthy meal plans and make a mini salad and fruit bar in my refrigerator, enjoying being my own sous-chef again.
And I want to sink, deliciously back into routine – coffee and blog mornings, oolong
Alas, with all my ambitions, it will take time.
All of you readers of Brocante Home must be so far ahead of me already in recovery from the Christmas Holidays. So do share… What are your tips for recovering from a long holiday and getting life back to normal?
Courtesy of Valerie at A Bohemian Season. Do stop by and say hello won’t you?
I wish I had some great tips to share, but I have the same issue–it takes me forever to get back into my "normal" routine after a vacation. It's especially bad after we've been gone for six weeks to the States each summer!
Dear Valerie,
I enjoyed your post very much and wanted to say that I have yet to get fully back to routine, and imagine that it is rather a common experience at this time of year-vacation or no. Many, many of us seem to be rather spinning our wheels this month, and I am learning to be patient with it…perhaps that is what January is for. We push so hard at the end of the year and this seems to be a good, quiet time to replenish.
I, too, have ambitions (your evocative list filled me with longing!), but as a caregiver for my mom who has dementia, I am learning to keep them very small and doable. So lots of rest and escape with good books and things to watch (Downton Abbey lately), and cooking from scratch have been at the top of the list these days…but I hope to build upon those as the days get longer and energy grows. In the meantime, what can wait will wait.
It is a lovely time to plot and plan, I think.
With warm wishes,
Lesley
Your post reminded me of two things.
1.) I need to prune our apple tree.
2.) I love Hawaii. How did you manage to jet away to the blissful isle? And what did you do?