No one ever told me how to keep Christmas, to put it simply, it’s little peculiar traditions are often passed down through the family from generation to generation, each one adding it’s own twist and change!
In all honesty I used to love Christmas as a child and as an adult! But I’ve come to realise that there is nothing to gain emotionally or mentally from living in the shadow of:
‘The ghost of Christmas past’.
It’s also important for me to acknowledge the sadness and disappointment I can feel both for my own experience of Christmas and of Trinity’s and ours as a family!
To help prepare myself for the anxiety surrounding the upcoming festivities, I wrote a poem inspired by the Christmas Carol, silent night:
I now understand (through experiencing how not to do Christmas with Trinity) that to ‘keep Christmas’, there has to be understanding, compassion, compromise and sack fulls of flexibility!
Personally I imagine myself to be more like Ebenezer Scrooge’s Nephew, wishing everyone a very merry Christmas with great enthusiasm!
Trinity I imagine would say:
‘You keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine’
(A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) [paraphrase: mine]
Trinity’s Daddy might say:
‘Bah, humbug’
Not because he doesn’t like it, but that he would perhaps wish not to keep it, due to its many, increased pressures, and inevitable anxiety it causes both Trinity and us as a family.
A few changes occurred for us this Christmas, which were both planned and unplanned!
Let’s talk about advent calendar’s! Below is a photo of a very cheerful felt Christmas tree Calendar!
Two years running this was a life saver! The first year we filled each pocket with giant chocolate buttons and mini fudges. ‘Wonderful’, I hear you say! Except that Trinity did not understand that you couldn’t eat them all now and this became a point of stress, anxiety, and meltdowns for her and us (probably more meltdowns from Mum than Dad)
So one evening inspired by Trinity’s favourite Christmas movie: ‘Christmas Monkey‘ (A Curious George movie) I decided to employ the help of one ‘Christmas Monkey’ so that Trinity might understand, chocolates were delivered once a day, after school only when Christmas Monkey appeared in the advent calendar. Very soon Christmas Monkey was Trinity’s favourite helper, Trinity began to realise there would always be a chocolate with him!
Well this year our strategy massively backfired, having hoped to be well organised we bought a selection of chocolate celebrations, however when we came to open them, they only contained one or two of Trinity’s favourites!
I’m not gonna lie to you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many ‘coconut chocolates’ in a selection box in my entire lifetime!
Talk about things going pear shaped! Christmas Monkey had never been back and forth so many times in one evening, only to be sent away again, as a disappointed Trinity became evermore frustrated at her best friend, ‘Curious George’.
Very sadly, this year was the year ‘Christmas Monkey’, got fired from his advent calendar position! I was actually really sad, because it had become our very own quirky Christmas tradition, two years running! (I don’t like change! The unpredictable stresses me out)
Also because my heart sank thinking, what on earth are we to do now! Thank God Trinity’s school had sent her home at the end of term with a laminated Santa’s beard advent calendar! The instructions were to cover each day with white fluff balls and when they are all covered it would be Christmas day!
I knew we couldn’t quite use it in the prescribed way, as the white fluff balls would go from Santa’s beard to Trinity’s belly!
Suddenly I remembered, Christmas Monkey had a calendar like this in the movie but he had a felt pen and crossed off each day! Ta-da! Curious George saves the day again.
Rushing to my work bag, I pulled out my green whiteboard marker pen. So from that day forward Trinity and I began a new tradition, Trinity seemed to enjoy helping me to mark off the days counting down to Christmas. Phew!
There are so many things at Christmas to stimulate the senses, from Christmas decorations to Christmas food, pungent smelling mulled wine and Christmas candles.
Being sensory seekers(an individual sensory profile is important to establish when understanding how people with Autism interact within their environment), in a lot of our interactions within the environment; Trinity and I absolutely love to savour the various cinnamon and berry infused sensations experienced at Christmas! Below is Trinity enjoying stirring our Christmas cake, but you won’t get her to eat it!
(Trinity is over-responsive to textures of food, because of this we have had to work very hard using a therapy plate to encourage Trinity to try different types of food, apart from her favourites).
To learn more about what it means to be a sensory seeker, click on the link below to access a comprehensive webinar led by an Occupational Therapist explaining Sensory Processing Difficulties in children with Autism:
Unfortunately how ever much I love the decorations, especially the Christmas tree, the bright lights I often find overstimulating and even irritating to my eyes!(The way I interact with the visual environment would be described as over-responsive or sensory aversive)
Perhaps I used to love the Christmas tree my Mum would decorate because she would often cover it in this cobweb type snow, which was like a sheet of white fiber that she distributed all over the decorated tree, it must have acted like a light diffuser!
Trinity on the other hand loves the Christmas tree decorations so much she pulls them off and plays with them, so we changed many of our decorations to more Trinity friendly ones!
One year I decided it would be an awesome idea to create salt dough decorations, so Trinity and I began making and decorating them! Well I couldn’t help but wonder where all the salt dough gingerbread men etc were disappearing to?
To my shock and horror, one evening I caught Trinity red handed having munched her way happily through a poor salt dough gingerbread man’s head! Back in the tin they went, never to grace our Christmas tree again!
Introducing a planned addition to our new family Christmas traditions:
We were quite surprised at just how much Trinity loved Elf on the Shelf! I wasn’t even sure if she would engage with it at all. To help encourage her I modelled some possible responses that a child might make (which I enjoyed way too much, shh! I love a bit of honest childlike roleplay).
Anyway Trinity was roaring with laughter and in no time at all she was hooked, up every day looking for ‘Elf on the Shelf’, to see what he’d been up to all night! Success!
Unwrapping Christmas presents on the big day is important to think about. Often children, young people and even adults with Autism can get very stressed and anxious about what might be underneath all the wrapping paper surrounding their presents. A surprise is usually a good thing right? Well what if your thoughts are whirring a hundred miles an hour:
What is it going to be? What if I don’t like it? How should I respond? Will I have to hug or kiss or shall I just say thankyou? When do we stop opening presents? Are they all mine?
When will this end! The shaking out of recycling bags, tearing and scrunching of paper stop!!!
We decided for the first time this year to only wrap up three presents for Trinity, to take the pressure and anxiety out of the whole process. Instead we put most things loose inside a cardboard box which we then wrapped!
The next big challenge was the Christmas dinner! We’ve been experiencing many sleepless nights with Trinity recently, knowing this we dodged a bullet by organising and prepping as much of our Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. I’m so glad that we did, as Trinity was up incredibly early 3am Christmas morning went back to bed at 6am and we all woke up at 9:40am! Ahh! I shot up and preheated the oven, we wanted to make sure dinner was ready for 12:30pm so we were so glad that our time spent preparing on Christmas eve was about to pay off!
Not only was the dinner ready and served by 12:30pm but we had eaten and cleared up by 1:15pm and Trinity ate all her dinner, even the swede and carrot mash which two years ago would’ve made her heave!
So will we decide to keep Christmas after all?
Yes we will, heartily and with great courage and Christmas spirit, we will keep it in our own way as Trinity would have it. We will keep it simple, as calm as possible, eat in our pyjamas and try to giggle, be well prepared ever ready, be kind to ourselves take the pressure off and not worry about keeping it in a way that is meaningful for other’s only, but keeping it in a way that is meaningful and stress free is what it needs to be! Flexible and free, our Spectrum Tale is told for now, until next time it remains for me to say,
Merry Christmas and hoping for a Happy New Year 2021!
With love, Embracing-Autism
Embracing-Autism 