How to keep from adding unwanted holiday pounds

1. Pack your schedule full full full in the weeks prior to Christmas. Do not prepare any Christmas cookie batter to store in the freezer.

2. In the last full week of school for your kids, schedule two doctor's appointments, and have 1 child get pink eye, 2 get the stomach flu and get sick yourself with a cold. Tell yourself that since you live in Spain that celebrates Christmas until Three Kings Day on January 6, that there is no rush to make cookie plates since they can be baked after Christmas and delivered later that week or the next. Besides, who would trust food baked in a house full of sick people?

3. Christmas week, remain sick with the cold to the point that you return to the doctor and have to take daily treatments on the nebulizer... which makes you so dizzy you can't stand up and walk a straight line. Have one of your kids start to run a fever, get the stomach flu yourself and spend a day and a half flat in bed. Eat nothing but crackers and ginger ale all day. Have another child develop a "is it pink eye/is it not pink eye?" type swelling in his eye late Friday night.

4. Develop a cough so hard it makes your muscles ache. Constantly remind yourself of your doctor in the states who always forbade milk products and sweets because it would increase the mucus production and make the cough worse. Remember that although you hated to admit it, he was right. Decide that you'd rather be able to sleep without coughing than eat the chocolate bar in your stocking.

5. Bake only what you need for the party you are planning for the church teens. Put all of it out on the table and encourage the two young men with the healthiest appetites to eat "all they want".

6.Decide that since the friends and neighbors aren't expecting cookie plates from you (you've only passed them out to the immediate neighbors and that was 2 years ago) you feel no pressure to push to make them this year. Let the kids frost the sugar cookies you did bake on Christmas eve for Santa's plate and be done with it.