Free time… I think I don’t have enough of it, but too often, I find myself relaxing and occupying my time with pointless activities. Here’s what I do when there’s nothing better:

Brainstorm and Act— As much as I love blogging and vlogging, there is a lot of [laborious] thought that goes in, before I can commence the real job. I like to use Apple’s Reminders app to organize all my different ideas (you’ll find that I rarely use pen and paper) because I can create different lists for each category (as seen below) of to-dos. And when I have more than a couple of minutes, I can hop right onto Tumblr to start that blog. If I have a lot more time, I can set up that camera and get a vlog done. (side note: I will start vlogging again soon; I know it’s been forever!)

Whether it’s almost Christmas or Hanukkah or Thanksgiving or any other holiday, there comes that one moment of “Wow, it’s [this holiday]! I’m so excited.” Many times, however, that moment never comes, and the holiday passes without an internal sense of holiday spirit.

Throwback: Christmas 2011 via the (late) Dailybooth

This year, I’m not in that Christmas mood—and I’m not happy about it.

But I have a theory to explain why that epiphany occasionally skips over some of us. Tell me what you think in the comments. 

School and work serve as the main sources of stress in many people’s lives. For me, homework, tests/quizzes/projects, and extra-curricular activities take up more time than they should. And of course, the time I spend directly correlates to my stress level. All that work tends to keep me away from the things I really feel like doing: catching up on my YouTube subscriptions, reading some random book, and going on Kikkerland.com to look for cute gadgets. I also like getting into the Christmastime spirit—but that’s an active process. So, in other words, I blame school for keeping me out of the Christmas mood.

Every year, we complain about the prolonged holiday season that seems to start a week before Halloween. What if it’s those ridiculously early-on commercials that are to blame? Christmas songs also blend together and become endlessly monotonous after about three weeks, and we all know it; why stretch that short period of pleasant holiday song listening so far? We resist and resist the holiday feelings throughout the month of November, and by the time Christmas rolls around, it just doesn’t feel how it should!

There are just a couple reasons why it might seem that Christmastime doesn’t feel the same as it used to. What do you think?

I hope all of your holiday season has gone/is going well! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!