The holiday season is a stressful time for many people, but I feel that it is especially stressful for mothers. This is the time of year that we are expected to make everything magical and special for our families while also maintaining the regular day-to-day operations of our homes, etc.
The number of things added to the already lengthy mother's to-do list include, but are not limited to:
- Schedule multiple activities to prevent conflicts
- Decorate your home to rival a magazine's version of the perfect holiday
- Prepare food for each event
- Shop for the food in order to prepare it for each event
- Purchase gifts for everyone that any member of your family has ever met
- Beautifully wrap and deliver the gifts before the deadline
- Participate and/or watch the local nativity pageants
- Visit Santa
- Attend the local Christmas parade
- Explore the Christmas light displays
- Bake multiple goodies as this is the season for sugary indulgences
- Design, order and send Christmas cards
- Ensure that each family member consumes the necessary vitamins and herbal supplements to fight off transmitted infections that occur when visiting family and friends in enclosed spaces
- Take the obligatory Christmas pictures in pj's
- Participate in multiple holiday markets to sell our homemade farm products
And these are just a few things that have appeared on my to-do list from mid-November through December. This list doesn't include school, work, those unfortunate birthdays that occur during this busy season, preparing the farm for winter weather, etc.
Every year, I attempt various ways of making the season run more smoothly. One year, I attempted to purchase all of the gifts by August. I found that this simply created more problems like storing the gifts, dealing with changed interests of the gift receivers and growth spurts. One year, I decided to spread everything out over a longer period of time. This simply added to the stress as it felt as if this busy season was never-ending.
No matter what method I used to deal with the holiday stress, I would always end the season very grumpy, exhausted and performing a good imitation of the Grinch. This led to the holiday season as something to "get through" rather than enjoy.
This year I did something a bit different. It wasn't overly intentional. I didn't declare a change at the beginning of the season. I was tired from a busy fall soccer and farm season, and I simply had had enough. I just said "No".
- I filled the calendar with only the family Christmas gatherings. I backed out of all of the scheduled craft shows and decided that I wanted more time than money this December (a hard decision to make with this inflation).
- I let the kids take over the decorations for the home and the girls loved this responsibility.
- We gave more handmade gifts this year. This decreased some costs but also required us to be more creative and intentional with the gifts we chose.
- I abdicated all responsibility from wrapping presents. Our presents weren't pretty and sometimes we had to guess the recipient, but it worked.
- I didn't send out Christmas cards.
- I didn't pre-shop for food for holiday gatherings. We pulled items from the pantry and got creative.
- We didn't attend a pageant, parade, light viewing nor visited Santa.
- We didn't do any additional baking, nor did we create a gingerbread house.
- We didn't take any holiday inspired pictures.
- Some of our gifts didn't even arrive in time to be opened by the giftee. We simply shipped them out with a note in January.
What did we do?
- We had free space in our calendar.
- We played board games and cards.
- We watched movies.
- We attended family gatherings.
- We occasionally slept in late.
I have had time to reflect upon this holiday season of "no". While we couldn't claim to have done any of the regular holiday things, we were more relaxed. We had much fewer blow-ups where the stressed-out mother loses her mind with her family because things aren't going as planned and she doesn't know how she is to get it all done. We were more rested. We laughed more. We were able to take the little things in stride a bit better.
Eliminating Christmas traditions didn't fix everything. A cold virus snuck into the house and attacked various members of the family. We still had issues getting out the door on time for events. We still had our regular sibling bickering moments.
Overall, this experiment of saying "no" during the holiday season was a successful one. I would like to slowly add more activities next year but hope to be very intentional about them so that we do not push out the relaxation and rest that we desperately need this time of year.
If you had to scale down your holiday activities, what would you eliminate? What would you keep?