Ready Or Not, Here Come The Holidays!
As the holidays approach, our thoughts may turn to traditional meals, beautiful decorations, and loving gatherings of family and friends. Unfortunately, the holidays can also usher in unrealistic expectations, heightened stress, family pressure and afterward, a bad case of the post-holiday blues.
How can we make the most of the positive aspects of the holiday season while minimizing its negative potential?
Minimizing the negative potential during the holidays simply requires a little preparation combined with some realistic expectations. To prepare your family I recommend that you sit down together and discuss the following questions:
1) What is this holiday about? What or who is it for?
2) What is your goal for the holiday season?
As simple as these questions sound, and as obvious as the answers may appear to be, many times individual family members enter the holidays with quite different ideas about the holiday. One mother told me that when she was honest with herself, she came to the realization that her "goal" for the season had been to "get through it without fighting with her parents." Her five year old son's goal was to "get a color Game-Boy," and her 8 year old daughter's goal was to "spend family time together." Beginning the season with these disparate and unspoken agendas had created family tension in the past. Once Mom and children heard their goals they realized that some adjustment was necessary -- not only to create a common focus for the family during the season, but also to realign their individual goals with their values regarding the holiday. Ultimately, they decided that the holiday was a spiritual event for them, and that their common goal would be to infuse each day with a sense of that spirituality. In addition, now that they were aware of each other's "sub-goals" they could find ways to respond to those desires as well.
When you share your private thoughts about the season with the other members in your family it will help you create a common focus based on the values you hold. This common focus then becomes an important component of "de-stressing" the season.
That said, however, it doesn't mean that your children will breeze through the holidays without a materialistic thought, or that your in-laws (or parents) won't still provide a challenge. Let's take these two issues separately.
It is an unfortunate fact that we live in a society where commercialism swirls around us in much the same way that the air we breathe surrounds us . It is part of both our conscience and our subconscious desires. Our children, too, breathe this "commercial air." Thus, when the days grow shorter and the air grows colder, an occasional bout of the "greedy-gimmes" is to be as expected as the common cold. How we, as parents, respond to our children when they get a case of the greedy-gimmes will determine how long it lasts and whether it pervades the holiday season. Here are a few tips:
1) Refrain from labeling your children as "greedy". Thinking of them as overly enthusiastic will help
