A reflection on Christmas glimmers and balance.

For some reason the winter holidays between Christmas and New Year are always a time of quiet reflection for me, which is also why I have an unbroken streak of these Christmas posts no matter how much I neglect my blog. After the Christmas rush is over both at work and at home, there follow those blissfully free couple of days that seem to fall out of the regular calendar; when you’ve overeaten, overshared and underslept and it is socially acceptable to spend a full day recovering in your comfiest pyjamas.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Christmas holidays and the associated family drama, but in recent years these in-between days are the time I treasure the most, when my mind is quiet, empty of immediate responsibilities and too under the influence of an enduring food comma to overthink, so I can just enjoy the moment and exist. Once January hits we are inevitably programmed to go into planning mode, where retrospective is used as a means to improvement, not reflection, which is why I wanted to capture this quiet vibe and share some December glimmers with you.

For those who are not familiar, glimmers are the Internet name for the positive micro-moments that are the opposite of triggers. If a trigger is something that sets us off into negative feelings for whatever reason, a glimmer is a cue that brings feelings of joy, safety and well-being. It can be as simple as hearing a pleasant sound or seeing a fluffy dog walk past you, but it is an impression powerful enough to momentarily calm the nervous system and help with regulation throughout the day, particularly if we consciously acknowledge the glimmer moment. Personally I struggle with adopting gratitude habits, but I seem to naturally find and enjoy glimmers because I’ve always been able to see the beauty in tiny details around me, so this is a trend I was happy to adopt.

Here are some of my Christmas glimmers in photos, both micro and more prolonged moments:

• Buying an ultra cute hedgehog-with-a-Christmas-hat pin at the art market and wearing it to work.
• Rushing to the post office to mail my Christmas gifts for Uresniči željo charity initiative on the last possible day in the morning before work and seeing a huge line of other people posting gift-wrapped parcels for various charity initiatives.
• Baking cookies for my family and friends throughout December, which feels like communing with my grandma’s spirit through her cookie recipes while sorting out complex feelings and stress to the sound of Jingle Bells or Iztok Mlakar (I baked 3 different kinds but one of them is an advent cake that looks like a chocolate-covered brick that did not photograph well).
• Putting up Christmas decorations and realising that one of my friends has sent me enough handmade Christmas cards over the years that they make up an entire wall, including this year’s card with a footprint of her baby.
• Watching my partner struggle with separating Christmas wheat sprouts to fill up all 8 jars that are supposed to be our mini herb garden on the kitchen wall, but all the herbs died during summer vacations 2 years ago and we never got around to replacing them, then realising that we’ve been living in our new home for 3 years and that I love it.
• Making DIY soap and herbal salve for Christmas gifts because we forgot to start the rum pot at the end of summer and realising that it was meant to be as my melt-and-pour soap ingredients were about to expire because it’s been almost 5 years since coronavirus lockdown times and all of my family and friends safely made it through that period.
• Playing cookie Tetris with our new Christmas goose ornament.
• Coming home to a beautiful last-minute Christmas tree on the 24th, set up by my partner and his sister while I was out catching up with my former work colleagues, which reinforced my belief that the career change I made last year was the right one. Our living room is again (still?) half a construction site, because we are building a dry wall in one of the other rooms, but the mess is part of the progress.
• Opening secret Santa gifts with my partner’s family and getting Čokolino (a type of chocolate children’s porridge mix), then a day later also watching the sparklers burn on the Christmas tree with my family, which has been my favourite Christmas tradition since I was a child.
• Watching a relative’s dog loudly enjoy his deer bone while we were drinking coffee in the kitchen.
• Writing a blog post about my Christmas glimmers while drinking tea and feeling at peace with the fact that I can enjoy my hobbies even if I practice them sporadically or badly, because it’s not about perfection. 🙂

Christmas glimmers

Whatever you want to call it – glimmers, moments of happiness, reflections, gratitude journaling and so on, it’s important to focus and overthink the good moments as much as the bad ones and it’s also important to remind others about it when they’ve temporarily lost perspective. I recently got such a well-timed reminder and am always greatful to have people in my life who care. It’s not about forced false positivity, it’s about seeing both sides of the coin for balance, especially in a world that skews heavily on the side of terrible news and preventable tragedies in an unfair system every day. So, come share some of your December glimmers in the comments below and let’s enjoy them together.

Wishing you all peaceful Christmas holidays and a wonderful 2026 to come!