By Marisue Alsobrook 

Beat The Holiday Blues

Holiday Blues can be unexpected and quickly drain us of energy and happiness.  Holidays can bring lonely feelings to the surface.  People who have these feelings can prepare now to avoid the depression that dominates your holidays.  To beat the holiday blues, we can stop the pressure by deciding now to buy less concentrate more on visiting with friends, focus on serving others and involve ourselves in charity. 

People Who have Lonely Feelings During Busy Season

First, during this busy season, we need to realize what is affecting our attitude.  TV commercials focused on holiday spending and “buying more” themes are constant visual and auditory influences. These TV commercials are nearly impossible to avoid.  Their annoying implications that we “just don’t have enough” sends both blaring and subtle messages to our brains.  Nervousness, depression and bad attitudes can seem to come suddenly out of nowhere, yet may be a direct response to this retail holiday brainwashing.  Replacing spending with service is an age old remedy, yet it bears repeating because it works. “Beat the Holiday Blues!” with the following steps:

Excessive Spending Brings Frustration and Guilt

• Spend Less.  Excessive spending and shopping to purchase gifts for our loved ones can be a depressing struggle, bringing frustration, guilt, even anger and sadness. TV, the blare of holiday music in stores, and the glaring over-loaded aisles of toys, perfume and more, leaves us feeling guilty for not experiencing their version of joy during the Christmas season. 

Holiday Expections Costs Money

• Build Realistic Holiday Expectations.  We can easily let our vision and holiday expectations, as well as the desire for more, cost money we don’t have.  Today, we pay more than ever for essentials such as mortgage payments, utilities, food and gasoline.  We wonder where and how we’ll get the money for gifts.  For many of us, funds are tighter this Holiday Season than perhaps ever before and that brings special planning.  Our moods need to be taken care of just like our bodies.  We don’t want to be carrying around the burden of guilt because we think we’ve failed to make the holidays a glittering fullfillment of dreams.  A simple change in our expectations can prevent Holiday Burn Out!  Maybe the secret is to take time to look at what we already have, ask for things that are attainable, and give service in place of things.  This sounds easy, but how do we get our children to understand that “less” can be “more?”

Serve People

• Serving Others is accomplished by getting involved in Local Charity or helping a  neighbor or family member.  When raising my children and foster parenting others, we discovered by accident really, that when we got the kids involved in helping someone else, our whole family attitude improved.  Jittery kids became more focused and calm, egos were humbled, and the demand for attention was less.  Serving others costs little except time, and the benefits are long lasting.   Even though it sounds old-fashioned, and we might think we can’t have a smaller gift-giving Christmas and still please the kids, I know that your family will bloom with having less and giving more.

Less Stress

We can have much less stress during the holidays.  I remember stressful Christmases and the cause was most often due to the following:

• Not enough money
• Not enough time
• Not enough thought and pre-planning 

We couldn’t afford the expensive electronic toys the kids wanted and many of our foster children carried the excess baggage of past sad and empty holidays.  The foster kids seemed like “the lonely people” no matter what we did.  Though we tried to give them a happy Christmas, a single Christmas filled with gifts can’t always fulfill the expectations of young people, or erase their previous sad holiday times.  Even our own children would sometimes get less than they wanted.  But now, they are in their twenties, and I’m hearing them say to us ”Mom, Dad, don’t spend too much on us this year.  Let’s just be together, eat a lot and go to movies.”  I breathe a nice breath of happiness and think, “There’s wisdom.”

Parenting Tips for the Holidays

Here are some parenting tips for holidays, survival and family joy: 

• Gather your kids around you now, and explain briefly that you want the holidays to be happy for everyone and that you need to talk about the funds that are available and get some ideas from them as to what they want and what they want to DO. 

(Hint:  Plan your comments before the family meeting and phrase your remarks in a positive way.   Instead of saying  ”We can’t get what you want, we have no money.” say ”We may have to choose less expensive items, and find ways to purchase other gifts later in the year.”  Shopping Christmas sales or if your kids are old enough to understand, have a small celebration on Christmas Day, and celebrate your own larger gift-giving in January or February.  If feels a bit odd, but we’ve done it and it’s different enough to be fun!) 

• Ignore the negative comments if they pop up.  Change brings “attitude” in teens particularly.   

(Hint: Give them time to accept the situation. A silent response from you after a few negatives from them can speak volumes.)

• Ask for brief input from each person. 

(Hint: Say something like “How do you feel about us making a few changes this year?  I think it can be fun to start a new tradition in the family. Maybe we’ll even have a few nice surprises along the way!”  Then, listen to them quitely, but keep the pace moving along.  Letting people express their feelings briefly throughout the discussion can lessen the negative impact of change.)

• Keep your conversation lighthearted and combine your news about the lower budget for receiving with ideas for giving.  Have specific ideas in mind that can be the substitute for expensive gifts, like ”service to others.”  You might say something like “What do you think about us adopting a family for Christmas, and give them a “like new” toy, and something homemade like cookies, maybe a bag of groceries and think of something we could do for them?”

(Hint: To help family members come up with ideas as they think about giving, try this:  Have everyone name at least three things they have now that they enjoy; three things they would like new this year that are affordable; and then at least one or two items they could give away.  Next, have everyone make a list of something they could do for someone else.  Prime their thinking by giving examples of things such as: clean a neighbor’s yard; take a neighbor’s trash to the curb for a month; volunteer to serve in a community soup kitchen, visit a nursing home and read stories to the elderly; sing in a community choir; pick a name from a charity tree and buy, make or give a like new gift, or various other volunteering.)

• Don’t try to re-invent the giving wheel.  Doing small things can give big rewards; doing many small things might be better than one big thing.
• Remind family members that sometimes after we have a big eventful day, we might feel let down the next few days.  What can we do to feel better during that time? 

(Hint:  The day after gift giving could be spent visiting with friends or family, going to movies or renting them and having friends over, shopping sales if funds allow. Maybe everyone could write a holiday journal or best moment note and exchange it with family members. Or cooking together, making less complicated meals from the leftovers….unless you’ve baked so much that you never want to step foot in the kitchen again…but you get the idea.  Just plan a distraction or activity for the “let down” time that often comes during the holidays.  Maybe you’ve been so rushed that several quite evenings at home is a good choice.)

• If finances require it, decide together how many gifts each person can receive, and then make an occasion for unwrapping. 

(Hint: Taking turns unwrapping gifts one at a time, might give a special tone to the gift exchange.  The facial expressions of the one opening a present is a big gift in itself and is often missed in the rush of unwrapping.  THAT is the moment parents look for as their children have their gift time.  Let the kids have that experiece too as they watch others open a gift.  Just slowing everything down might make the time even more joyful, which can help make small gifts feel important.)

• Think Creatively 

(Hint:  Plan a 12 days of Christmas celebration.  Learn the history of the song, think of twelves things that you want to happen before Christmas, either with a small gift each day or better yet, in keeping with the “serving others theme” do something special for someone everyday; maybe even draw a name from a jar and  do things in secret for that person….just be as creative as your dreams allow.  That’s the FUN of the Holidays!)

Now that you’re started on your “Less Stress is Best” journey, have fun!  Do more for others, and I just know you’ll receive and experience the best Christmas Ever in return, and “BEAT THE HOLIDAY BLUES!”

Please refer to the tip sheet “Parenting Tips for the Holidays” located on the home page in the columns to the right for quick reference.

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