I have been thinking a lot about how things are often not bad, just different. Sometimes when things are not the way we like them, not in the perfect little gift box with a bow on top, we automatically frame them as bad.

My daughter got married a couple of years ago, and our son was living in Melbourne. This left us with an empty nest facing a very different Christmas. My first thought was that I could never enjoy Christmas again.

I considered pretending Christmas wasn't happening. So much so that I didn't shop. It seemed impossible to believe that Christmas could be good if it wasn't the way it was "supposed" to be. I didn't shop until I panicked, on Christmas Eve (a Saturday - the shops in South Australia closed at 5) and realised that just because I decided Christmas needed to not happen this year, didn't mean that everyone else had.

I am a champion emotion stuffer, the deeper I can stuff the feeling down and not feel it, the better I am doing. Or at least that's how it works when I am explaining it to myself. The most important part of being able to embrace a change as not bad just different, is to let yourself grieve first. Talk to someone you trust, see a counsellor if you need to, process the emotions around the change. Without facing the sadness of it, it's really hard to see a way through the this isn't happening phase.

As a family we have started new traditions around Christmas, the kids sleep over, or we sleep at theirs, we do a breakfast in the morning and then they go off for their day and we spend the day with my parents. Our family Christmas with our extended family is not even on Christmas Day anymore, which actually works better. Christmas isn't the same as it was - it's not bad it's just different.

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