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Don’t Worry, Be Merry

We all love the holidays and anticipate a joyful experience. Unfortunately, we tend to go overboard, planning and even obsessing about ensuring the entire season is extra special.

Trying to conjure up the best holidays possible frequently delivers a hectic, stressful disaster. Instead of enjoying this festive season, we spend it fretting about how to make our holidays perfect.

Time management is one of the chief causes of holiday stress. What is typically your free time is suddenly consumed with shopping, cooking, packing, wrapping and decorating. We try to sandwich all that frenzied holiday busywork between parties and traditional events.

This month, we’ll be looking at ways to reduce holiday stress. If you find December to be a grueling grind, we’ve got some great ideas to help you make it the most wonderful time of the year.

Start Early

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. ~Lily Tomlin

We often laugh at or dread the fact Christmas decorations start appearing in shopping malls and department stores right after Labor Day. We don’t need to board the not-so-subtle holiday commercialization train, but we can learn a something from it.

Starting our holiday preparations early will reduce the pressure we feel during the holidays, helping us to make the season less stressful. Spreading out the chores and the expenses over the entire year will free up time to spend with loved ones instead of playing shopping cart roller derby at the stores.

If you plan your holiday shopping in the first quarter of the year, you’ll have plenty of time to pick things up, wrap them and stash them where the kids won’t find them. There are sales throughout the year, so you don’t need to wait until Black Friday to find the best deals on basic gifts.

You can also start a Christmas Club if your bank offers that service. If not, you can put a few dollars each week into a festive Christmas cookie tin and set it aside until the holidays arrive.

It’s okay to check if the Christmas lights are working and if all the ornaments are still in one piece well before you plan on decorating. By tackling these preparatory tasks early, you can avoid the feeling of being in a rush in late December. Ensuring that things will be working, untangled and intact will make the process of decorating for the holidays a fun family activity instead of a fraught stress-fest.

Be Like Santa

Dealing with holiday stress: Mayo Clinic Radio

The song Santa Claus Is Coming To Town tells us that he’s making a list and checking it twice. Leaving the delivery of millions of toys up to his memory would leave him stressed and depressed. This is an important lesson to learn from Santa Claus.

We can create our own organized lists of holiday tasks and chores.

Making some basic, or even detailed, lists of things that need to be done will reduce a lot of the stress that we load ourselves down with during the holidays.

The earlier we can set this list up, the more time we’ll have to take care of things that can be done and over. This will allow us to schedule out blocks of time in the holiday season, knowing that some of the usual time-killers are already taken care of.

Not to beat the drum too fervently but the earlier we start, the easier it is to manage the typically hectic holidays. It may feel like we’re playing Christmas music out of season, but an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure.

The great thing is that having created this list, we can use it again and again.

Take the time to review which parts of your holiday prep worked and plan fixes for the parts that fell short. Within a few years, you’ll have formed a habit that will ensure that the holidays are always as stress-free as possible.

Leave The Miracles To God

If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it. ~George Burns

There’s a lot to be said for dialing down expectations as a way of managing stress. The urge to have the “Perfect Christmas” is typically a formula for disaster.

Instead of stressing over every detail of the holidays, it’s important to remember the Reason for the Season. Whether you’re religious or secular, Christmas is a time for hope, peace, joy and love.

Trying to cram in all of the seasonal razzmatazz is a recipe for disappointment. Instead, we should focus on family, friends and fun without trying to force it to be a spectacular Broadway production.

Let the Rockettes be the Rockettes and let your holidays be the pause that refreshes. It’s actually the perfect season to “Be still and know that I am God“. Scheduling some quiet time to reflect on how your year went can have tremendous benefits to body, mind and soul.

12 Benefits of Quiet Time

Focusing on what matters most to you will help to avoid wasting precious hours in activities and projects that are not crucial to your ideal holiday.

Vain attempts to cram every single party, theatrical production and snowball fight into the season that you can will invite needless stress. We want that Currier & Ives or Norman Rockwell vibe, but do our level best to make it a tinsel-laden dumpster fire.

We’re not miracle-workers. We’re just people who want to make the holidays magical for our kids and to enjoy a bit of togetherness as the days shorten and the snow begins to fall.

It’s okay to take some time to enjoy the pleasures of the holidays. If we’ve spread our shopping out over the entire year and planned our activities with sober forethought, we can kick back and enjoy the holidays together in comfort and calm.

Who could ask for anything more?

The holidays should be a time of relaxation and enjoyment. With a little planning, you can avoid falling into the seasonal rat race that spoils Christmas for so many other stressed out people. If you see someone in that situation, share what you’ve learned. That’s a wonderful gift you don’t even have to buy or wrap!