Well, as the title suggests, today has been a very quiet, reflective and productive day for me.

My children, all apart from my son Matthew, live in other countries and my son Matthew an his partner Trish decided that they wanted to have a Christmas day to themselves this year.  Something which I think is an excellent idea!  It is so easy to be selfish on these occasions and certainly I would loved to have them home for the day, but that would be putting my own needs and desires above theirs and would not have been fair.

And so, living alone as I do, I decided that I really wasn’t going to do the whole Christmas thing this year   Now don’t get me wrong, I am by no means an old scrooge (bah humbug) it is just that it all seemed like too much bother and since my wife was very much into Christmas and really made Christmas’s very special, when she left us my Christmas spirit kind of suffered and then kind of totally moved out when Matthew later moved out to have his own relationships

Ordinarily I would attend church Christmas morning but couldn’t get over there this morning and so I decided that I would spend the day blog surfing in case anyone needed support and basically just resting up and reflecting on the year that has nearly passed.

Sadly my internet connection had different ideas when it came to my blog surfing and so I instead spent the day editing one of my books and just reflecting.  And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

That is not to say that the day was without it’s struggles.  Christmas can be such a difficult time for some of us can’t it?  And on top of that last night I learned that someone I am very close to and very fond of appears to be losing their battle with Cancer.  But whilst there is prayer there is hope as far as I can see it.

A real blessing today, however was the fact that my son and his partner brought me round a wonderful Christmas dinner this afternoon.  Makes my teaching him how to cook when he was younger so much more worth it when you get to sample the results of his cooking skills

In 7 minutes it will be the end of Christmas Day here in Ireland and I will have survived another one without too many struggles and in fact, generally speaking, with a positive and productive outcome.

So many of you have been on my heart today and I am only sorry I couldn’t get online more to be there for folk.  But I am so very grateful for all the love and support that has obvious been around today.  It is just one of those things that makes the mental health blogging community so very special.