I enjoyed your web site! A great thing for women to share history through theatre--and you have great variety of production choices too.

How does midlife Christmasing differ from other times? As the "sandwich generation," we're sometimes challenged to take on more. We're less energetic than we were in our twenties and thirties--and we often have symptoms of menopause like "cottonhead" and depression and fatigue and so on. Since our financial resources are often greater, we're sometimes expected to do more, too. But our salvation is this: We're also more mature in our thinking. We can say "Enough! Let's make some conscious choices this year." Or, at least, "I'm making sane choices this year for myself."

I personally decide each year how I'll celebrate Advent, since that's my tradition. Some of it is overtly spiritual, like going to church Sundays and walking and meditating in the mornings. Some of it is just taking better care of myself: One year I scheduled regular massages in December. Another year I avoided eating sugar between Thanksgiving and Christmas (hard to do during the Eating Season--but I sure felt better that year.) This year, I got my gifts bought and wrapped by Thanksgiving Day, so I'm avoiding trips to the mall. Just making a choice every year helps me stay out of the holiday "autopilot" mode.

At midlife we're hopefully less prone to get into competitions about who can cook the most or decorate the best or whatever else. Some years we do the whole baking thing--it's fun to make gingerbread houses with grandchildren--but we do it because it's fun, and not because we have to. Other years, we might decide not to do a particular thing. (Decorating a Christmas tree might be mandatory when we have kids at home, but not so important when we're in midlife.)

But I'm curious about how other people cope. What do you do to stay low-key during the holidays?