We are hurtling fast towards the festive season. If, like me, you come from a tradition of big celebrations and love Christmas, this can be one of those times of year when having a debilitating health condition really sucks!
When you live with a chronic illness, your life is organised by a combination of compromises and sacrifices and, unfortunately, the festive season is no different. However, we make the best of things, don’t we? I have written more about the wider changes and adaptations in How Fibro Affects Daily Life.
Plan Ahead for the Festive Season
There are things you can do early, delegate or adapt to help you have the celebration you are hoping for without completely burning out, triggering a massive flare-up, becoming over-anxious or missing out too much.
If you are someone who likes to plan, whether that means an app, a planner or a basic piece of paper with a calendar printed on it, I really recommend making a plan.
Allow for a flare-up
As a Spoonie, when creating your seasonal preparations plan, allow for at least one week when a flare-up of symptoms could knock things off course.
If you don’t need that extra time, brilliant, you’ll simply be ready early. If you don’t allow for it and then do need it, disaster could strike!
Get the Jobs You Can Do Early Out of the Way
Christmas cardmaking for spoonie crafters
As a crafter, I naturally make all my Christmas cards, so when do you think I start? October? June? No. I find the best time to start making Christmas cards is between 27th December and 6th January.
The decorations are still up, I’m feeling festive and all of the pre-Christmas busyness is out of the way. It is a great time to make a good head start and, depending on the available time and my health, I can get quite a few made.
I then pick things up again, in terms of planning or purchasing, in June when the next year’s Christmas crafting products are launched. I usually start making cards again somewhere between October and November, depending on what else I am doing and how many cards I managed to make in that first batch.
Like most of my creative hobbies, cardmaking has had to adapt around my health over the years. I talk about some of the ways I make creativity work with limited energy in Being Creative With Fibromyalgia.
For the cards I make for the immediate family, I used to leave those until the week leading up to Christmas. Pre-Fibro, that was fine. These days I can’t take the risk of assuming I’ll be relatively well, or that an unexpected flare-up won’t arrive at exactly the wrong moment, so I make those in early December.
Writing bought Christmas cards
For the majority of you who probably don’t make your own cards, I really suggest trying to have them all written by the end of November.
If you are a last-minute type of person because you are just not feeling the festive vibe in November, trust me, it is worth getting this sort of task done as soon as possible. It doesn’t rely on fresh food, good weather or anyone else’s timetable, so once it is done, it is one less thing hanging over you in December.
Christmas shopping
Before I developed Fibromyalgia, other than making cards, I didn’t really do any preparations for the festive season until I started opening the doors on the Advent Calendar. Now that is just not an option. You simply don’t know when a flare-up could cause you to lose a week. Remember what I said at the beginning of this post about planning...?
I try to have all the gifts bought by the end of November, or perhaps the first week of December if I am deliberately waiting for something that is being released later.
I used to do most of my shopping in stores because I enjoyed browsing. Now I do the majority online. What’s not to like?! I can browse lots of different shops, compare prices and look for bargains without using precious spoons walking around all those shops.
I still really like the ethos of shopping small and local where possible. Social media and local community groups can be useful for discovering small businesses you might otherwise never come across. That said, I’m also on a limited budget, so shopping small has to make financial sense. Supporting a small business is lovely, but not if it means spending money you simply don’t have.
If you are still wondering what to buy for someone living with chronic illness, I have also put together my [Christmas Gift Ideas for Spoonies 2026], with ideas chosen specifically with Spoonie life in mind.
Wrapping presents
I love wrapping Christmas presents and making them look special, even if it is only a £1 stocking filler.
I used to enjoy wrapping all the presents for everyone in the house on Christmas Eve. It was one of the biggest highlights of the day, the final part of the preparations. These days, I wouldn’t risk leaving it that late. What if I have one of my horrible headaches or a flare-up and I’m simply not up to it? Even without that, wrapping everything in one go would be a push now.
We have dramatically downsized in terms of gift-giving, so I could probably wrap everything in one session if I really wanted to. I still don’t.
I recommend wrapping things as you buy or make them. It spreads out the effort and, if you enjoy wrapping, it spreads out the pleasure too.
I especially recommend this for parents of young children because I used to be one. A young child, not a parent!
I still remember having a little nosy around possible hiding places when I was far too young to understand the delayed gratification of Christmas morning, but probably old enough to have known better...
Make Decorating Easier
Are you the type of person who likes everything to look perfect, or do you go all out and decorate everything that doesn’t move?
Let go of perfect
If you are a bit of a perfectionist, my best advice is to delegate and let other members of the family have a go, even the kids if you have them.
It may not match your usual presentation, but I bet they’ll have a great time joining in and love being allowed to help. If they don’t do quite as good a job as you hoped for, a few subtle tweaks later are far easier than doing the whole lot yourself.
Sometimes “good enough and enjoyed together” is a much better result than “perfect and completely exhausting”.
Share the decorating
If decorating everything that doesn’t move sounds more like you, then you really have two options: scale back, or recruit help.
Why not get some friends or family around and turn decorating into a working party? Put some music on, provide a few nibbles and make an occasion of it.
Rather than spending several days doing everything yourself and breaking your back in the process, you can have a much nicer time directing operations while everyone else does some of the legwork.
Don’t Miss Out on the Festive Season
Enjoy some Christmas atmosphere
Although I now do most of my Christmas shopping online, I still like to get out at least once and soak up some of the festive atmosphere.
My compromise is to go Christmas shopping without the pressure of actually needing to buy very much. I can enjoy the lights, decorations and general Christmas buzz, perhaps pick up the odd stocking filler, and then come home without having spent hours trudging around the shops.
Back in 2017, I even managed to visit a large retail park to see the iconic Coca-Cola Christmas truck. I drink Pepsi Max, sorry...
When old traditions are no longer possible
This is a difficult one for me.
Before Fibromyalgia, the festive season meant being busy with my church choir, singing carols out in the community throughout December. I loved it and felt such a strong connection to the choir.
For a while after becoming ill, I could still manage the occasional event. In 2016 I attended the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, and after moving to the village I later joined a community choir with a much easier schedule. In 2019 I was even able to sing at the switching on of the village Christmas lights and take part in a couple of concerts.
Then my health worsened again. After a long flare-up, the pandemic and the impact the first Covid vaccine had on my health, I never really got back to where I had been. Other than in front of the TV, I haven’t sung since.
If there is a festive activity or tradition that means a lot to you and you simply cannot do it anymore, give yourself permission to be sad about that. Losing something you genuinely loved is still a loss.
Create new festive traditions
That sadness does not mean the whole festive season has to be ruined.
Try to find something new to do in the space where the old tradition used to be. It does not have to replace it, because sometimes nothing really can, but it can become a new part of Christmas that you look forward to in its own right.
For us, that has become watching Christmas films, from the epic to the ridiculously cheesy, sometimes with a hot chocolate or a naughty snack.
Before Fibromyalgia, December was packed with choir commitments and rehearsals for pantomimes to be performed in the New Year. I was lucky if I saw five festive films over the whole season.
Now there are years when we watch one almost every day in December, as well as a few at the end of November.
It is very different, but different does not automatically mean worse.
Make Festive Food Easier
I am fortunate that I am not principally responsible for Christmas dinner.
Up until 2018, it was prepared by my father with some assistance from my brother and/or myself. In 2019 we had our first Christmas in the new house with just the two of us. Michael is the cook and I am more of a baker, although these days that definitely comes with an asterisk! Depending on my health, Michael often has to do at least half of the baking too, and sometimes considerably more.
Thankfully, most of our festive baking can be finished by Christmas Eve at the latest, and naturally I still help with the big meal where I can.
What if you're the main cook?
There is so much pressure to provide the perfect Christmas meal, but realistically you need to pick your battles.
There will probably be parts of the meal that are genuine family favourites and worth the extra effort. Other things can be compromised on. Swap something fresh for frozen. Buy the pigs in blankets or forcemeat stuffing ready prepared. There is no medal for making absolutely everything from scratch.
If you are expecting company, don’t feel you have to be responsible for the whole meal either. Most guests will be more than happy to contribute if asked, especially if they know you live with a chronic health condition.
When Christmas dinner doesn't go to plan
Some of my favourite Christmas dinner memories are actually the occasions when things went wrong.
One year, the serving dish caught fire as we were finishing the main course! It was one of those dishes with tea lights underneath to keep the food warm, and it was really old. My parents had received it as a wedding present more than fifty years earlier. Somehow the plastic on one of the handles, which was nowhere near the candles, caught fire.
My brother rushed it out of the house wearing oven gloves and, thankfully, no damage was done to the table or anything else. Amazingly, the dish was repaired, given new handles and carried on being used. We still talk and laugh about it.
The second incident was less dramatic. While our New Year’s Day repeat of Christmas dinner was being prepared, Dad suddenly realised the parsnips from Christmas Day were still sitting in the fryer.
No one had even missed them.
After all that effort to get everything right, nobody had noticed that an entire part of the meal was missing. That probably tells you everything you need to know about how important perfection really is.
Often, when things go “wrong”, they make the best memories. Give yourself a break!
Prepare for festive eating
We have talked about food in terms of preparing the meal, but there is another kind of preparation worth thinking about too.
If you usually eat fairly small or simple meals, or perhaps you have been dieting or restricting richer foods, going straight from that to a huge Christmas dinner can be quite a shock to the system.
I tend to think of it a bit like someone who never exercises suddenly going to the gym and doing a serious workout. They are probably going to know about it afterwards!
So if you know that you want to indulge a little over Christmas, it may be worth thinking ahead rather than going from one extreme to the other overnight. A week or two of gradually moving towards your festive eating habits might suit you better than one enormous blowout on Christmas Day.
Remember Medication and Other Essentials
Festive preparations can make it surprisingly easy to forget the boring everyday jobs that still need doing.
If you take regular prescription medication and/or supplements, make sure you are not going to run out over the festive season.
Michael and I both use pillboxes. Every six days we sit down and fill them for the week ahead, and at the same time check whether there will be enough medication for the next refill. If not, it gets ordered.
Since we started doing this, we have had no “I’ve run out of pills” crises. Before pillboxes, it was another matter!
Check prescriptions before the Christmas closures
Here in the UK, it is worth looking ahead at the Christmas and New Year bank holidays rather than only thinking about the next few days.
If a repeat prescription is due around the festive period, check in good time when your GP surgery and pharmacy will be open and when you need to place the order.
You may be able to request a repeat prescription a little earlier than usual if the normal timing would leave you running short because of holiday closures, but it is much better to sort that out before everyone else has the same idea.
Check the little things you might suddenly need
While you are doing that sort of practical check, have a think about the other little essentials that are ridiculously easy to forget. Do you have enough batteries for toys, lights or gadgets? Enough Sellotape and wrapping paper? Gift tags? Bin bags? Anything you know you will suddenly need when the shops are shut or when going back out again is the last thing your body wants to do?
None of these things are exciting, but they can remove a surprising amount of last-minute stress.
Save Some Spoons for Christmas Itself
You really don’t have to sacrifice your enjoyment of the big day, or days. The trick is to start early, pace yourself and remember that preparing for Christmas can use just as many spoons as Christmas itself.
Do what you can ahead of time, but don’t fall into the trap of trying to do everything early in one enormous burst either. That rather defeats the object if you trigger a flare-up before December has properly begun.
A slow, steady pace is enough.
And however well you plan, there is always the possibility that a flare-up will arrive at exactly the wrong moment. That is why I think it is important not to save all the enjoyment for Christmas Day itself.
Watch festive films with the family. Do little Christmas crafts with the children, or with elderly relatives. Enjoy the lights, the music, the baking, the silly traditions and the quieter moments along the way.
Create plenty of memories before the big day, so that if your health does decide to throw a tantrum at Christmas, you haven’t missed the whole season.
Most of all, give yourself permission to have the Christmas that works for you rather than the one you think you are supposed to produce.
It does not have to be perfect to be special.