Are You Bah Humbug about the Holidays?

Mara here:

I want to start by thanking all of our readers for being a part of our little journey for the last two years. It's been amazing to interact with everyone and share pieces of our lives with you.

However, we have decided that this will be our last month of blogs. Our final post will be Sunday, December 30th.

My mother will continue to write articles for Psychology Today and other online sites. And she'll continue to post on her social media pages, such a Facebook and Twitter. But the blog itself will not continue. 

That said, we hope you enjoy the final few blogs as we wrap up the end of the year.

This week I thought I'd write about the holidays. 

For many people the holidays are a really tough time. I have a friend who struggles with it every year.

When I talk to her, I can tell she struggles with her feelings about Christmas. There's so much pressure to "be happy" and "love" the holidays. But for her, December is filled with dread. She doesn't want to celebrate the holidays and knows people don't understand why she is such a "grinch."

But the reality is that the holidays are hard for almost everyone. Even for people who enjoy celebrating, it's impossible not feel the stress of busy schedules and trying to fit in additional activities into what are already hectic days.

And if you are someone who doesn't do a lot of celebrating this time of year or have close friends and family to share the days with, there's stress involved with not having enough to do. 

I have found that regardless of what the reality is for people, everyone ends up feeling a little frazzled. There's never enough time, and there's always more that could be done.

And of course there's the money.

Not included in most of the advertisements and stories about the holidays is the stress that comes from needing to pay for all the merriment. Parties and gifts and decorations all come at a cost. Trying to budget and manage expectations feels overwhelming.

And the social pressure to do things like everyone else does them is strong. It's hard to feel like you're not doing what other people are doing. I remember as a child wanting to do all the same things as my friends did. For me as a kid that meant making Christmas lists and looking through catalogs to circle coveted items.

However, my parents didn't like the emphasis on asking and receiving. They really wanted Christmas to be about giving us things as surprises. And they really tried to get me to just appreciate the holiday for what it was—which was time to spend with my family and get some special gifts.

But for most of my childhood, I spent Christmas just being upset that it wasn't what I expected. Or I would get upset that I didn't do things the way everyone else did them.

Fortunately for me my parents were very understanding. They put up with me and my constant pushing to do things differently. They were understanding of my feelings, even though I was unable to see things from their perspective.

Now, as an adult and a parent, the pressure to make Christmas feel special can feel very burdensome. It seems as if there's a never-ending pressure to try and make things better than before. And when our daughter was young, it was a lot of work to try and make Christmas feel special. For the first few years of her life, I was really trying to give her an experience that I felt I'd missed out on.

But the lesson I learned pretty quickly was that you can't force something to be special. The first few Christmases, I felt drained and stressed. I wasn't able to enjoy the day. I was anxious if it had gone the way it was "supposed" to go. I was focused on making sure I checked certain boxes off my mental list of how things "should" go.

I would run myself ragged baking cookies, decorating gingerbread houses, and going to light displays, etc. And by the time Christmas rolled around I was so exhausted all I wanted to do was lay in bed for a week.

What I didn't have the foresight to realize was that having set up the holidays in a way that I felt was "special," it was not "special" for my daughter. For my daughter, doing all these "special" things were just doing the regular holidays things. 

And I found I was unable to escape the familiar feeling of disappointment. Because it's impossible for reality to match a fantasy. And when we mentally try to pre-plan how we want things to happen and how we want people to react, we are usually setting ourselves up for failure.

Unlike my parents, I was less understanding of my daughter's youthful holiday demands. I was quickly resentful and unhappy because it felt like I was giving her a great Christmas.

What I failed to understand was that I was giving myself a great Christmas. I was doing what I thought would have made me happy at her age. And I can't expect my daughter to feel the same way.

This is why my friend immediately gets a scowl on her face when she thinks about Christmas. She has spent most of her adult life trying to shed the burden of expectation that her mother had about the holiday. And as soon as Thanksgiving ends, she immediately starts dreading the feelings of frustration. that she associates with Christmas. Those feelings of frustration then are quickly accompanied by a lot of guilt she feels about those feelings. She beats herself up in a cycle of resentment, guilt about the resentment, and then anger about the guilt, until she's numb. Her reaction is now to just want to say "Bah Humbug" and slam the door on all festivities.

So I guess I just wanted to say that to all those people who don't feel giddy about the prospect of the upcoming holidays—it's okay!  It's okay to not feel festive. And it's okay if other people don't understand how you feel. 

And remember, you don't need explain your feelings. You get to feel how you want to feel. And just like other people shouldn't expect you to feel a certain way, you don't get to bah humbug all over other people.

Hopefully, you can celebrate the holidays however you choose to celebrate, whether that means doing nothing—or it means going all out.

The most important thing is to try to do what makes you happy. Or at least aim for making yourself the least unhappy.

We sincerely hope that everyone is able to find some joy during the holidays.

I asked my mom a few questions about the holidays

Do you find it difficult to face the holidays, knowing that you aren't able to celebrate the way you wish you could?

Yes, it is difficult...but it's gotten better. I've written quite a few Psychology Today articles about coping with the holidays when you suffer from chronic pain and illness. As you said, it's a stressful time for everyone, so it's not surprising that it can be extra hard on those who are severely limited in what they can do.

When I first got sick, I became depressed during the holidays, but I finally realized that it was making things worse for me and those around me. So now I just do the best I can and try to enjoy myself...and it works out fine.

Oh, and writing about it for others has helped me. Writing about practical ways to survive the holidays when you're chronically ill has given me tools to use. This year I'm going to post a "holiday letter" (the what-we-did-this-year letter) that the chronically ill would write. Once again, it's helping me out just to write it.

For parents, healthy or sick, what's your best advice for managing family expectations so that parents and kids can enjoy Christmas or Hanukkah? (Or whatever holiday people celebrate!)

I would try to lower your expectations and to try and immunize yourself from all those ads that keep telling you that you should always be happy during the holidays. Most people feel a mixture of happiness and sadness this time of year.

Lower your expectations by recognizing that the holidays will be a mixture of fun and stress, joy and disappointment. I see this as an equanimity practice—working on keeping an even, balanced state of mind that isn't carried away by either joys or sorrows. When we get so joyful that we cling to the feeling (meaning we push ourselves to feel joyful throughout the holidays), we're setting ourselves up for always feeling that the holidays fell short.

I hope everyone is able to enjoy themselves and also recognize that the "perfect" holiday is something we've mocked up in our minds and that it doesn't exist in real life. Taking a more measured approach like this makes the holidays so much more pleasant.

And I wish the best to your friend, Mara. She's not alone in struggling during this time of the year.