“Un-Trying” the Holidays
By Susan Neudorf, an Adopt4Life community parent
Grief and stress around a holiday season are a familiar topic, with many great articles and blog posts where experts dole out tips and strategies to manage our time, budget, children, and extended family. I have personally benefited from many of these resources. Still, the approach of any holiday season creates a ball of stress in my belly and a strong desire to run for the hills. Consider a dictionary definition of the word holiday: “a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done”. Wow. I am fairly certain that if I go with this definition, I have not had a holiday since 2001 (the last year that I was child free). My stress response to holidays comes from others’ expectations of me to view the approaching holidays with joy and anticipation. It will be fun! There will be food, visiting, decorations, traditions, and gifts! All those things do come, and I even enjoy some of them. Even so, managing people and interactions, trying to create that dictionary-definition holiday comes at an incredible emotional cost.
Even if COVID knocks out in-person extended family gatherings this year, we are still left dealing with holidays amongst our immediate families. You need to figure out what works for you, and anyone else sharing your household. It doesn’t matter how much effort I put in, or how many books I read, I have been unable to find a way to make holidays happy for all of us, all the time. I know it sounds ridiculous that I even tried, but I truly believed that if I learned enough and worked hard enough, I could make the holidays fun for everyone. Nope. The only answer I found was to stop trying. Yes, that’s right—stop trying. Stop striving for perfection. Here are some things that I started doing:
If you live with another adult, tell them how you truly feel about holidays. Do not assume they know. They may disagree; but they should know your thoughts.
Talk to your family and figure out the 1 or 2 most important holiday pieces for each person. Focus your energy on those. These are what make your family happy, and you will feel reward for the energy you put into them.
Choose one holiday activity that you love and make time to do it when you can actually enjoy it. Favourite holiday food? Eat it as a late-night meal after the kids are in bed. Favourite outdoor activity? Only take the child that enjoys it. Favourite religious service? Partake with an adult friend or join online once the kids go to bed.
Clearly explain Zoom rules to extended family. Is everyone doing a holiday zoom session? Send out an email to extended family, letting them know what to expect. In my family, that means a 5-minute cameo appearance from each teenager, and a quick pop up hello from the younger child. Parents appear separately, as we tag team dealing with the kids.
Embrace screen time to keep multiple family members happy at the same time. We can spend over an hour decorating our tree: after 20 minutes our little guy is handed the iPad. Our oldest teen loves black and white holiday movies: we schedule these when the little guy is in bed and the other teen is playing video games.
Never participate in anything that makes you feel like a “prop”. Are you going somewhere, and you know that you will end up in a corner/bathroom/car dealing with a child’s behaviour? Just say no. That is too much stress, for you and your child, just so it can be said that “the whole family was there together”.
I wish that I loved all the holidays as much as other members of my family. Maybe someday I will find my way back to feeling joyful anticipation instead of stressful dread. Maybe I won’t. It has taken me years to let go of the grief of not being able to celebrate a holiday in a “normal” way, and the guilt I feel for not even enjoying the holidays. But working with the truth of how I feel, and how my family functions, is way easier than whatever failed pretending I was doing before. Best of luck as you find your own way through!
The opinions expressed in blogs posted reflect their author and do not represent any official stance of Adopt4Life. We respect the diversity of opinions within the adoption, kinship and customary care community and hope that these posts will stimulate meaningful conversations.