We are merely days away from the start of a brand new year. It is the time to make a list of things we want to do in 2017 and turn them into New Year’s Resolutions. You know, those promises we make to ourselves each January that often barely make it to the end of the month. It’s an exercise I have not participated in for several years.
 
Make that, many, many years.
 
In fact, I cannot recall the last time I made even one New Year’s Resolution. Possibly the last one I made was to never make any more of them. Sure, a resolution is not a bad idea and I don’t want you to think I am trying to talk you in or out of anything. If your annual end-of-year tradition is to make a few resolutions, then go ahead and continue. You’ll just be doing it without me.
 
While I look back on 2016 I can come up with many reasons to try to forget the year as quickly as possible. I lost a life-long companion in February when we had to put Magnum – a cat I’ve had for close to 19 years – to sleep. It was not as easy as I expected and thankfully my wife, Brenda was there with me. I hope to never experience that again.
 
Throughout the first half of the year we struggled with our business. As it turned out, the first quarter of 2016 was the absolute worse for my company in the 12 years I had owned it. I expected – and hoped and prayed for a turnaround – but it never came. In May we decided to just shut the doors at the end of July. We didn’t sell the business, we just closed it.
 
It was a sad experience for me and I was asked again today if I had plans to eventually reopen. When I said that I wasn’t going to I was then asked if I have missed my business. I have been asked that question often lately (twice today) and while I didn’t at first, I am starting to miss it a little bit more each time I get asked.
 
The other side of the coin is that logically it (reopening the business) can’t happen and that I have moved on. Speaking of moving, that was part of our original plan after closing our business. It didn’t happen as our lives changed and other opportunities came our way as we were days away from our final day in our office space.
 
We did have a wonderful holiday in August – a time I have never taken a holiday in my working years. We explored a part of the province both of us barely knew. It inspired us to make an annual holiday plan for roughly the same time of year. We also have found a great deal of freedom attached to the changes in our lives following the closure of our business. However, none of this has convinced me I need to make a New Year’s Resolution.
 
I’m not fretting over my weight, although I could stand to drop a few pounds, nor do I feel the need to bulk up or join a gym. I don’t smoke nor do I drink so the typical vices that resolutions are built upon do not exist in my life, so I find making these lose weight/stop smoking/eat better promises not a necessary part of my life.
 
Besides, I don’t need a special date in order to start doing something new or different. I think that’s the main reason why I do not make New Year’s Resolutions. They say it takes three weeks or 21 days to establish a new habit. Nowhere does it say that in order for that habit to be valid the change must start on January 1st.
 
And so, a New Year will enter my life as it normally does – a different month and year to start getting used to writing down when I start any of my freelance projects after the end of December. For more reasons why I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, check out this podcast: Ninja on the Loose.

As we approach to within days of Christmas both Brenda and I have noticed a big difference in our lives. Typically this time of year we would have just finished our single largest issue of our newspaper – the Christmas Issue. It would have consumed full days, a couple of evenings and most certainly parts of weekends over the past three weeks. The only reward we would be looking for after all of the work would be a four day break over Christmas.
 
The unofficial tradition with the newspaper was to take Christmas week off. That was how things were when I started with the business in 2000 and I followed the same publication schedule when I became owner of the newspaper in 2004. It sounded like a pretty sweet deal, actually. Work all year for a whole week off at a time of year when you should stop and take a break. However, in recent years the week off became four, possibly five days off for me.
 
After all the work leading up to the Christmas Issue there had to be an equal amount of work put into tearing down the pages and prepping for the first issue of the New Year. There were other considerations as well which often put me back in the office earlier than Brenda. It was never a problem because after four days off I would start to get ‘itchy’ and needed to get back into the work routine.
 
Deadlines will do that to you.
 
This December has been completely different. What both of us noticed most was that neither of us is stressed out about anything. We would normally try to get the Christmas Issue billing in the mail as soon as we could but would still find ourselves waiting until February or March for the bulk of the payments to come in which added additional stress. For a change that is not part of our usual Christmas Tradition this year.
 
Another interesting difference is that we are not getting spread out too thin at this time of year. Yesterday someone commented to me that they had been in attendance at a local Christmas presentation and noted how odd it was not to see me there with my camera. In fact, we haven’t been to very many functions that would normally be our focus going into our Christmas Issue. We have actually got the time to attend the odd house party for a change – a first for us!
 
It also means our own Christmas break will not be restricted to just four days. I’ve already notified all my freelance clients that I am unavailable to work for them for a period of time around Christmas. I am ‘this close’ to clearing off all outstanding writing projects to free up that time and we are going to just relax without a deadline controlling the window of opportunity presented to us. It is both exciting and a little bit disorienting for me.
 
The Deadline was what kept me grounded. It was the constant ticking time bomb that forced me to be organized enough to diffuse the bomb early every Monday with a trip out of town to collect the finished printed copies of the new edition of the Similkameen News Leader. I do miss that in many ways but I also don’t miss it in many ways.
 
This Christmas will be interesting for me without that ticking in the background.
 
I have struggled for years to try to establish a Christmas Tradition for Brenda and I that would be ‘our thing’ and last year I basically resigned myself to the idea that our tradition was to have no set routine. Maybe that was a product of the Deadline. There was only so much time available to do something at Christmastime because of it. This year will be different and I’m looking forward to it!

​Just over four months have passed since we closed the doors to the newspaper. I wondered for quite some time how I would feel without the sense of having a regular deadline looming in my immediate future and the hustle and bustle of chasing it each week. I thought that possibly I would either become bored or maybe even depressed.
 
As it turns out, as I have been able to keep myself busy, I have not had much time to contemplate the loss. I found myself in a conversation yesterday morning with another local business owner who recently closed her business. It was somehow comforting to me to know that I was not alone in this “figuring it out” phase after closing something that was such a big part of my life.
 
We both agreed that our lives had changed into something more positive following the closures and that many doors have opened as a result. Later in the day someone I had not seen for awhile asked both Brenda and I how retirement was treating us. I had to point out that we did not retire. If anything we have just changed directions.
 
This seems to be a hurdle for many who know us. I guess that seeing us on a regular basis and having the connection with us through our newspaper business must have felt as if we were a part of their lives. Now that the newspaper is gone and we are not a daily fixture in many lives that connection is gone or lost.
 
My explanation is usually along the lines that I am just about as busy now as I was before we closed the business. “I’ve heard that about retirement” is the regular response. I then have to explain that Brenda has been busy with her canning business (JamBusters!) and pretty much everyone we know is aware of that product.
 
Where things get interesting is when I start talking about my freelance work, the online things I do and the webcasting for the local hockey club. I tend to receive confusing looks back at me and a comment along the lines of, “You can make money writing online?” I guess I’m a bit more ahead of the curve than I thought I was.
 
Regardless, the fact of the matter is that neither of us has really slowed down. The main difference in our lives from pre-closure to post-closure is that we have a lot more freedom and control over what we are doing. We are no longer 100-percent dependent on the local market to support us and we are much more relaxed and having fun doing what we are doing.
 
It is far from retirement.
 
We are not sleeping in, watching the news all day and planning our next RV trip. If anything, we are still working as hard as we were but our careers have changed and we are enjoying the change. One day we may actually retire, but I don’t see it coming anytime soon. Semi-retirement is possible but I doubt either of us will fully retire with the way things have been going for us so far.