Traditions, Celebrations and Travelling Alone

Anniversaries, Christmas, Birthdays happen every year. A tricky part of living with loss is the 'firsts' after the before times. The way Steve and I celebrated will never be the same in his absence.

Changes happened when our children grew up, we didn't see this as a bad thing. Our babies became children, Santa retired. Our children became adults,  moved out to develop their own family traditions with their own children.  We never really mourned the loss of Santa because we were delighted we had raised our kids to stand on their own two feet. It was a massive change though. 

We focused on positives,  they both did well at work, made us grandparents and so on. Steve won't be back  I'll love and miss him forever and his hopes and dreams will stay lockedin my heart.  I plan to create new traditions to reflect my new situation.

Christmas was always going to be tricky because Steve died on the 19th December. I decided to do 4 things to make things easier

1) Get Christmas preparations done in November in case I get  overwhelmed closer to the date.

2) Make the house beautiful and cosy to enjoy throughout December. Steve absolutely loved Christmas, he would be so cross if I gave up celebrating. He'd feel he'd 'upset' Christmas for us. I'm not having that

3) I plan to celebrate Steve's love of life this year by inviting family & friends round on the anniversary of his passing. This will for us replaced the wake after the traditional funeral most people have.  The pandemic meant we couldn't  have visitors round after he died for a couple of months due to the strict lock-down restrictions and laws. - Hmm it  later transpired that  government ministers themselves ignored the laws they imposed on everyone else. I'm not sure if he'd have wanted me to be fined - he would have found it funny though.

4) I decided to  do something different over the Christmas period. I went to Silverstone Circuit which was fun.  I was able to stay busy,  visit the kids so I didn't end up cooking Christmas dinner for one which would have been a huge faff and probably ended up with me feeling  sad. 

I had a lovely Christmas period. Steve would be smiling and saying "good on ya girl" I know  

I did my Christmas shopping in November as planned, I booked myself a beautiful  room in the Chester Grosvenor Hotel for a  few night's. Perfect for shopping in Chester Town Centre I love the history, the shopping, restaurants and people,