I get the response all of the time, "You have been doing this for decades, why can't you just buckle down, keep your head down and stay on track with consistent workouts and diet?" The short answer: I don't fucking want to. And if you want to judge, be sure to put in over 30 years of training before you do.
See, the Holidays to me are more about family and having fun spending time doing things I don't normally do the rest of the year - like sitting on my ass and doing nothing on occasion. Oh, I still train and I still eat clean ... sometimes. I just give priority to friends and family from about mid-November to the 1st of the year. Then, family and friends can suck it for the next 10.5 months until the Holidays get here again. 🙂
I am in a holding pattern of sorts at the Holidays. I am still going to train and maintain muscle and condition but I work everything around my Holiday schedule. EG: From week to week I will figure out the days I am going to workout and that might be different each and every week. I also fall back to training only 3 days a week to maximize recovery and typically do this through late January. It allows me more time to do other things and makes it quite unlikely that by the time I turn things back up in late January that I am nowhere near overtrained and ready to respond to increased workout intensity and frequency.
As for dieting or eating clean: I eat clean until I don't want to. That might be for most of the week and not on the weekends or it might be that I eat clean most of the day and then have dinner with my family somewhere. I won't get "fat" over the Holidays but I definitely will not be getting leaner, either. My workouts are awesome due to the added calories and less frequent workouts and I enjoy training with few, if any, aches and pains.
This week I will train Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. NO more training on the weekends, for sure. My wife starts a new job on Wednesday so I don't want her to have to worry about having her meals perfect during the day of her new job and then have no idea when she will get out of work on her first day. Next week we have long time friends in town from France so we will train Monday, Wednesday and Thursday and not Friday, Saturday or Sunday so we can hang out with them and eat burgers and ... whatever we want.
Call me #nonbeastmode or whatever you like but I will be busting it in January again like I always do. In the meantime, I will enjoy my training, and the Holidays and I hope you do, as well.