How to have a happier holiday
Ecumenical tips for making the holiday season less manic and more meaningful
Over the last few years, I noticed a trend: I was starting to dread the holidays. Like many women, I find myself in charge of all things holiday — decorating, shopping for our kids, buying teacher’s gifts, hiring a photographer for the holiday card, and more. I get help, but I’m the point person. And I’m not alone. According to the Mayo Clinic, research shows that women are almost twice as likely as men to say they’ll do “all the work necessary to pull off the festivities.” Frankly, that feels like an understatement to me.
So I started keeping notes. And last year, I did a holiday retrospective for my household. The idea of doing a retro came from my time at a tech consultancy. A retro is a team ceremony that forces you to reflect on the successes and failures of a project. You use the past to define your future. You talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what you could do better next time.
Here’s what my holiday retro looked like: I took photos of decor that I loved so I could recreate the same look every year; I saved holiday menus, making notations about quantities and modifications; I updated the spreadsheet of addresses we send Christmas cards to; I recorded how much cash I gave the UPS man, the garbage collectors, and our housekeepers; and I thought long and hard about what made the holidays feel more like a chore than a joy.
At the top of that list — the Christmas tree. So in 2021, after 26 years of buying a real tree, I got on Amazon and ordered the pre-lit “feel real” artificial tree recommended by the practical people at Young House Love. I love real greenery, but I hate watering the tree (I’m in charge of that, too), slowly watching the tree die, and then cleaning up the aftermath.
It was a liberating decision, and I’m genuinely excited that we’ll be able to put up the tree sooner and leave it up longer. But it’s not just the faux fir tree that changed my attitude. It was reading about Kate Mangino’s concept of “noticers” in this recent interview with Culture Study.
The Noticer is often the person in the house who does all the nice little things: putting family photos around the home; buying pumpkins for decoration in October; organizing social events with friends and family. These individual acts might not make or break a household, but collectively, they are essential to making a home friendlier, more inviting, and more comfortable.
I believe Noticing is also linked to emotional health. Those feelings of coziness, safety, love, comfort, connection – all of those are potential ways to improve emotional health. We might not make that decision consciously – “I am updating the family photos to improve our emotional well-being” – but subconsciously, perhaps that is exactly what we are doing. Noticers care about others, and noticing is a way to demonstrate love.
Now, look. I wish I weren’t the only one doing the noticing. And I don’t want to imply that this is women’s work — you already know how I feel about that. But reading this helped me understand that noticing has a measurable impact. And I hear the same from my kids — especially the two that no longer live at home. They notice my noticing — and the longer they are away from home, the more they talk about it.
I’m still experimenting with a few other ideas to make my holidays happier, but here’s what’s worked for me so far —
Preserving traditions
What my kids (ages 22, 19, and 16) want more than anything during the Christmas season is to preserve tradition. They love doing the things we’ve always done just the way we’ve always done them. (As you can imagine, this made introducing the concept of a faux tree a little tricky, but I’ve gotten them on board with the promise of using real greenery elsewhere in the house.)
The most important holiday tradition in our house is the annual ornament. This is a tradition I inherited from my own family. (In fact, my parents still do it for all of the grandkids.) Every year when we decorate the tree, we give each child an ornament that signifies an accomplishment or milestone from the past year. A bike the year they learned to ride a two-wheeler, a book the year they learned to read, the school mascot when they started high school. You get the idea.
We also celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6, and the kids wear matching pajamas on Christmas Eve (at my daughter’s request). Each year, I have to reassure the kids that we are not abandoning any of these traditions. “We still do St. Nicholas, right?” “Are the Christmas pajamas clean?” “Do you have everyone’s ornaments? We’re doing the tree tonight.” This year I’ll answer “Yes, yes, and yes,” with a new appreciation for why these traditions matter.
Looking to establish some traditions of your own? Here’s a good list to get you started.
Being more thoughtful about gift giving
Our oldest child was seven months old the first time he celebrated Christmas. We bought him a few small gifts. But so did my parents. And my in-laws. And most of the aunts and uncles. As I looked at the towering pile of gifts under the tree, I imagined future holidays with more kids and more gifts, and I decided we weren’t going to do that.
Our kids get one gift from us and one gift from Santa. Period. (I know it’s ridiculous that Santa still visits, but I chalk it up to the importance of tradition.) That’s how we’ve done it since 2001, and the kids have never complained. We even got the grandparents on board. At first, my in-laws didn’t comply, but my husband finally told them, “You can send as many gifts as you’d like. But we’re only going to keep one for each kid, and we’ll donate the rest to charity.”
There are many reasons to give fewer gifts — environmental, budgetary, religious — but the irony is that giving our kids less makes the two gifts they receive feel “more exciting and more special” (my daughter’s words).
We exchanged gifts with my parents, siblings, and their significant others for years. But it started to feel pretty hollow. So now, rather than buying each other stuff we don’t need, we make a collective charitable gift. And we take turns choosing the beneficiary.
Last year it was my parents' turn to choose. We “adopted” a residential treatment facility for women dealing with drug and alcohol addiction. We gave each resident several gift cards and purchased a new computer and printer for the group to share. We also donated to the home’s “joy project,” which covers things like yoga classes, equine therapy, and more. We’ve made a collective charitable gift for more than a decade now, and the holidays wouldn’t be the same without this group effort.
If you’d like to adopt a family for Christmas, consider working with the Salvation Army, or contact your local house of worship to identify a family in need.
Volunteering as a family
It might be hard to imagine squeezing in one more thing during the busy holiday season, but I promise you that volunteering is worth it. A lot of research — including this 2020 study from the UK — shows volunteering makes you happier and improves your mental health.
We deliver meals and groceries to the homebound through Meals on Wheels every Christmas Eve. This is another tradition my children love. We see neighborhoods we wouldn’t otherwise see and meet people we wouldn’t otherwise meet. It is equal parts humbling and heartwarming. My oldest son says doing Meals on Wheels on Christmas Eve is a more spiritual experience than attending church.
A quick Google search will turn up plenty of volunteer opportunities in your community.
To send cards or not to send cards? That is the question.
Sending holiday cards requires a ton of effort: getting a family photo, choosing and ordering the card, and then addressing the envelopes. But for me, it’s totally worth it. I love that sending holiday cards forces us to get a professional family photo (at least every other year). And I love getting holiday cards from my friends and family. In fact, I make a garland out of them and hang it from the stairs with rope lights.
My friend Regan doesn’t send cards. About a decade ago, she decided the cost of cards and postage (not to mention her time) could be better spent helping people. So each year, she sends a digital holiday card and donates what she would have spent on traditional cards and postage to a local food bank.
Pro tip: Choose the card you want and work on the layout as soon as possible. Put the card in your card but wait to order it until you’re offered a big discount code — they’re coming, I promise.
Bonus tips
We’ve covered the big topics, but there are plenty of simple things you can do to make your holidays happier, too. Most of these tips come from Vicki, a member of the Skin of Our Teeth team:
Involve your partner in gift-giving by scheduling a shopping date. I got this idea from my friend Kathryn years ago. She and her husband would spend the day shopping for their children together. They enjoyed a mid-day break over lunch and then ended the day with cocktails. Need to order some stuff online? Bring an iPad or laptop and do it together while you sip your drinks.
When you see Starbucks gift cards, buy them. Lots of them of them. Buy boxed holiday cards as soon as you see them, too. (The good ones go fast.) That way, you’ve got last-minute gifts for the folks you’ve inevitably forgotten, and you’re not stuck waiting for your custom cards to arrive.
Same goes for gift bags. When you see good ones, buy them. They can be hard to find later in the season.
Switch to solar string lights for outside decorations. They turn themselves on and off and save energy.
Buy a pair of holiday shoes for parties. Vicki likes these and these, both from J. Crew Factory. They’re an easy way to give any outfit a festive upgrade.
Finally, do your own holiday retro in 2022 so next year’s holidays can be even happier.
Got a tip to share? Drop it in the comments below.
Also on my mind
This New York Times story about how little doctors know about the clitoris explains why so few seem to understand about female pleasure and protecting it. It’s an alarming must-read.
I loved this essay about the very specific grief of losing your best friend to an out-of-town move. My favorite line: “ I think some part of me really believed that when it finally felt safe to really go out again, we would do it together. We would refind all those girls we were in this city and introduce them to the women we’ve become.”
One of the reasons I love the winter is that I feel much less guilty about spending a cold day in the cinema. And this holiday movie roundup from the AV Club has got me really excited — there are so many movies I want to see. She Said! Causeway! Glass Onion! And, of course, The Menu, which my son worked on as a production assistant during his final year of college.
RBG and Toni Morrison and women’s soccer! Oh my! The USPS recently revealed its lineup of 2023 stamps.
What’s wrong with kids’ sports? Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters, says the problem is systemic. Kids’ sports are no longer about kids. And the more parents spend on their kids’ sports, the less the kid enjoys it.
Now that the midterm elections are in our rearview mirror and no one was kidnapped or killed, we can finally exhale. This parody, “If I emailed my parents like the Democrats email me,” provides much-needed comic relief.
I first heard about the book How to Keep House While Drowning on the Good Inside podcast. Then I saw it at a cute little indie bookshop and decided someone was trying to tell me something. If you feel like you work for your home, but your home doesn’t work for you, this slim little volume is worth a read. The most radical thought for me so far?
As children, many of us are taught we cannot rest or play until our chores are done. This is because our parents desire to teach us the good values of responsibility, delayed gratification, care for our environment, and respect for our family. This arrangement works quite well because as a child your chores are finite. Usually a short list: make your bed, take out the trash, and fold your laundry, et cetera. So we finish the list and we move on without guilt. However, when we become adults, the list of care tasks is not finite. It is a never-ending list of tasks that repeat themselves daily. How many of us internalized the message that we cannot move on to rest or play until this list is done? And if we do, we feel guilt. How will we raise our children (or re-parent ourselves) to learn both responsibility and rest?
Turns out kids from different generations and different countries share a lot of the same references. How to type BOOB on a calculator. How to make that cool “S” that starts with six parallel lines. The words to “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells.” How? Why? This is the story of childlore.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the focus of my creative work. It could do so many things. But I can’t do everything. So, where to start? According to Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, I need a manifesto. “To feel less unmoored, you need to create strong anchors to your values, develop ethical navigation tools and describe honest destinations,” she says. You can learn more about personal manifestos here and register for a workshop to help you write your own here.
I came across two cool iPhone hacks this week: How to lock sensitive photos and how to draw perfect shapes (circles, arrows, etc.) on screenshots.
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