Thoughts from the Budding Daisies - Part 4

Guest blogger, nearly 9 year-old Magic Bunny, tells us about autism from her perspective.

Christmas: The ups and downs

Christmas. A holly-jolly time for celebrating, giving gifts, and being together with friends and family. But for autistic people, sometimes Christmas can be a very different matter…

Let’s say you were given a coffee/tea mug as a present from your aunt. Now, this mug has cats all over it, because your aunt loves cats. But you hate cats. You much prefer dogs. And the mug is yellow, but you like green. At Christmas, there are things that autistic people love, like in this story the person (perhaps yourself) has been wanting a new coffee mug for ages, and this is quite a shiny mug. But you’d much prefer a different mug. Autistic people can sometimes feel pressured to join in with the holiday festivities that they don’t like e.g. having Christmas food that they can’t stand the texture of, so for some families it’s good to make adaptations for your autistic member(s).

For example, you could:

• Let your autistic child choose whether they want to wear Christmas clothes or not

• Make sure that you don’t have any loud sounds that might be distressing for autistic people (tearing of wrapping paper, loud Christmas music, etc.)

• Allow them to eat something other than traditional Christmas dinner/lunch. In my family, I eat Turkey Dinosaurs™ (like chicken nuggets but with turkey instead of chicken and shaped like dinosaurs. They are delicious, but that’s my opinion) instead of actual turkey, and it’s actually really helps.

I’m afraid this is the end, but for now…I wish you a merry Christmas, I wish you a merry Christmas, I wish you a merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Magic Bunny is a soon to be 9 year-old guest blogger for NeonDaisy