The Upside Down

Did you know one of the biggest fads this Holiday Season is an upside down Christmas Tree?
They are trending and are extremely popular with influencers. Karl Lagerfield even designed one
for Claridge’s in London. I recently saw one at the Hotel Del Coronado and I have to admit, I
didn’t know it was a statement of how crazy 2017 has been.

2016 was the year Stranger Things debuted on Netflix and we all learned about “The Upside
Down”. For those of you who did not have a chance to watch the show, The Upside Down is an
alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world. It contains the same locations and
infrastructure as the human world, but it is much darker, colder and obscured by an omnipresent
fog.

It is way too early in December to be doing a retrospective on 2017, but I do enjoy the upside
downtrend, especially taking into account Stranger Things. Christmas has many deeply rooted
traditions, and to see something new got my attention and to realize it was a political statement
intrigued me even more.

Should we let the Holidays be politicized in order to express the artist’s displeasure? Saying NO
or ignoring the disruptors in our life is so important during the Holidays. Protecting your
headspace from invaders such as negativity, stress and self-doubt needs to be high on your

priority list, way more important than addressing every Holiday card when you can have
tinyprints do it.

One Christmas when my kids were young, I had cooked the entire big Christmas Eve dinner, and
the next day was the giant production, we even had a scavenger hunt with clues leading my kids
to a grand finale gift. In the early afternoon, I went to go get the Ham to start Dinner and I
looked at my husband and said: “Let’s just order sushi”. He laughed, so I sat down for a while,
watched The Christmas Story and we had a very different Christmas Dinner. It was great, I think
about the meal and smile. Maybe ordering sushi instead of making a Ham sounds like The
Upside Down to you, but it was the right decision for me. Not falling into the trap of having
everything perfect over the Holidays will keep us sane.

If you want to hang your Christmas tree upside down do it! Do whatever you need to do to have
your best Holiday season, even if that means you have a Hanukkah bush with white lights on it.
Don’t feel the pressure for things to be perfect, or to make a statement you do not want to make.
Whatever you believe this Holiday Season, remember to keep your mind-body connection intact,
it will ground you. It will enable you to say NO to the food you do not want to eat, NO to parties you
would rather not attend and YES to a night in with your kids watching Holidays movies. Being
in touch with what we truly want can help us decide if we want to hang our Christmas tree from
the ceiling!!

Xo,

Erin

Tomorrow’s Topic: The Perimeter