Your creative Christmas gift
Unleash your inner creative over the festive season
Happy holidays!
Whatever festivals you celebrate, I hope you’re having a lovely seasonal break. I’m so grateful for every single one of you. When I first started this Substack in the spring, I thought it would be nice to reach 100 subscribers by the end of the year - now I’m celebrating Christmas having had 150 amazing people join my community. Honestly, it means the world to me. So I wanted to offer you a couple of festive gifts.
In this newsletter are:
A free downloadable creative activity for mindfulness and calm during the busy, and sometimes stressful, festive period
Some creative ideas to help you savour your holiday memories
A discount if you want to give yourself a creative Christmas gift
Create your calm
This can be an overwhelming time of year for many reasons, so I wanted to share with you a creative wellbeing tool that is so helpful for slowing down, calming the mind and finding some peace within.
This activity uses a grid of nine squares - here’s a downloadable one that you can print off, but you also easily make your own:
In each box, use repetitive patterns of lines or shapes to create an image. Try to use different patterns in each box. Don’t think too much about it, just let your pen(cil) flow.
If you want to, you could try incorporating repetitive words or phrases in some of the boxes. But keep it simple. The idea is for this to be a meditative exercise, not one that engages your brain in crafting sentences.
Speaking of calm…
If you’re looking for a calm creative space this festive season, my Calm Creative Retreat is the perfect escape. From 27th to 30th December, I’m sending out daily creative prompts and reflection exercises to help you carve out some time to nurture your creative soul during that special period between Christmas and New Year where we seem to step outside normal time.
It’s completely free to join in, and you can do the exercises on your own schedule to suit whatever sense of calm you can find. Sign up here.
Memory exercises
If this is a special time of year for you and you want to capture some precious memories, or if you’d like to revisit memories of Christmases past, here are a few exercises you can try:
Collect mementos from Christmas - pieces of wrapping paper, stubs of tickets, cards, leaves, anything you pick up along the way - and use them to create a collage.
Bring together photos from Christmases through the years, and put them together in a collage, or make a memory tree (you can draw a picture of a tree, or build a tree from twigs or cardboard, then hang the photos from the branches). You could also choose to write short pieces about each of the photos, or make an artwork inspired by the memories they bring back.
As you move through your special day(s), carry a notebook with you and make a note of any moments that you want to remember or that you feel especially grateful for. Later, you can revisit your notes and turn them into a longer piece of writing, a gratitude tree (similar to the memory tree above), an artwork or a collage (this works particularly well if you have photos, or can make drawings, to illustrate the moment you’ve written about).
Ask each person at your Christmas gathering to draw a little doodle (it can be as abstract as they like) or write a few words to express how they feel about the day. Only give them a small piece of paper. Then you can use all the pieces to create a collage or artwork.
Ask each person to give you just one word to sum up their experience of the gathering, and use those words to inspire an artwork or a piece of writing.
Choose a word that sums up the gathering for yourself, then collect images, quotes, lines from poems or anything else that illustrates that word for you and put them together in a collage or artwork.
Get yourself something nice
It’s been one heck of a year! Treat yourself to a gift that will nurture your creative habit - goodness knows, you deserve it!
If you’d like to unleash your creativity in 2024, I’d like to offer you 50% off a paid subscription for I Am Happy if you sign up before 1st January. That means you’ll pay just £4 per month, or £40 for the year - and, if you choose the monthly option, that will be the price you pay for a full 12 months.
For that, you’ll get weekly creative prompts, regular creative wellbeing tools and resources, and weekly musings on happiness and seasonal living.
Get your discount at https://iamhappy.substack.com/xmas.
I’ll also be launching a new online course, Unlock Your Creativity, in the new year, so look out for that! If you’re feeling blocked or hesitant about your creative abilities, this course will help you break through and build a regular creative habit. There’ll be a discount for I Am Happy subscribers.
There’s no Wednesday email from me next week, because I’m on Christmas break and I’ll be immersed in my calm creative retreat, hiding from the world. I will send out an email on 30th December to share a New Year ritual I follow every year, to help shape the months ahead without committing to any inflexible and unachievable resolutions. Until then, have a wonderful Christmas, and thank you again for being here.
With love, Allegra x
Thank you for these wonderful ideas Allegra! Congrats on 150 subscribers, that's wonderful❤
Woohoo, 150 readers is an awesome milestone 😊
Happy Holidays to you, and thank you for the prompts to consider moving through this next weeks