The holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is one of our favorite times of the year! It may be yours, too. It’s a time of peculiar joy and gleefulness. Do you know what we mean…people get into a groove around this time that makes them more pleasant to be around? Perhaps it’s abbreviated work schedules, the parties, or the food. Of course, the movie line-up takes us back to our childhood with Charlie Brown, the Abominable snowman, and Rudolph. I bet you’ve got favorite movie traditions around this time, don’t you? We sure do. Of course, there’s great debate over another tradition: when to set up the Christmas lights. Are you a pre-Thanksgiving decorator or do those people get on your nerves? When we’re able to do it, we like to decorate the week before Thanksgiving and then hit the light switch in dramatic fashion immediately after Thanksgiving dinner. But hey, to each his own…no hate here! 

The holiday season is a wonderful time of year for a lot of people but it’s not without its downfalls. It can simultaneously be one of the most stressful seasons as well. To help you have more of the Thanksgiving warmth and yuletide cheer, my wife and I have put together a few tips for managing the stress of the holiday season. 

Weiden Tip #1: Set a Budget

One of the most common sources of stress during the holiday season is money. Specifically, not having enough of it to do all we want to do and to give all the gifts we want to give. Because of this, many people ignore the bank account figures and opt for a more carefree approach to holiday spending. One article we read on Thefool.com says that the average debt of Americans last holiday season was over $1200. Despite the rush of pleasure that shopping and gifting brings, a majority of people, 62% according to some reports, say they are stressed out by their debt. And for good reason. When it takes months to pay off that debt, it saps up all the extra resources that could be used to help you get through the inevitable “gray season” that follows this most jubilant one. Racking up holiday debt is a short-sighted rush that comes with a long-lasting crash. It’s Christmas “merry” followed quickly by winter “misery.” 

Here’s a key truth: Your kids want stuff…that’s an understatement. They don’t care how you pay for it as long as they wake up to it on Christmas morning. However, no amount of gifts given at Christmas will make up for months of parental misery afterward as credit card bills flood in. 

The solution is simple: set a budget. Take time now to look at your finances and what expenses you’ll incur this holiday season. Consider reasonable gift limits for your family. Once you’ve determined what you can afford, talk about it with your kids. You’re not doing your children any good by creating an imaginary world in which people can have all they want without consequences. For families with little kids, it can be helpful to set a limit of number of gifts you will give. In years past Kellye and I have given each of our five kids three gifts each. As kids get older, those gifts get more expensive. You may need to transition to a cash spending limit rather than number of gifts for kids in their pre-teen and teen years. This may represent a deviation from years past. However, if you bring your children into the budgeting process, you’ll find that kids can be pretty understanding. Especially if it means a more peaceful and fun mom and dad during this season and the season that follows!

As you work out your budget, don’t forget to include all the holiday parties and gift exchanges. In no other season of the year do we pack in as many get-togethers: school activities, work parties, church gatherings, and family gift exchanges. If you’re like Kellye and me, you know the tension of wanting to be fully engaged at each opportunity you’re invited to and not breaking the bank. There are ways of achieving both. 

Instead of budgeting for a gift at each of the gift exchanges, regift whatever you walk away with from one party at the next. One year Kellye and I attended no less than six family get-togethers and each one had a “White Elephant” gift exchange. We bought a gift for each event, spending about $10 on each one. That was twelve gifts just for the two of us, $120! Then it hit us, we don’t actually want this stuff, it’s just a way to have fun with family. So, the next year we bought one gift each, wrapped it, and put it in the community pile at our first gathering. That evening we took whatever tacky gift we ended up with and wrapped it up for our next party and so on and so on. I don’t remember, but my guess is we ended up with a cheap men’s cologne package and an “As Seen On TV” trinket or something of equal value that neither one of us wanted. But we saved $100 that year and we had a great time! 

One thing people often overlook when setting up a budget is the food commitments they make for all the holiday parties. One green-bean casserole may not break the bank itself. However, when combined with cookies for the kids’ school parties, a pot-luck Thanksgiving meal at church, and “I’ll grab the sodas” on the way to grandma’s house, you can drop a hundred bucks or two just on food this season. Make sure you think through this and plan accordingly.

Lastly, do you travel for the holidays? Work that into the budget too. 

In the end, you’ll have a much more relaxed and enjoyable holiday season if you know, and stick to, the agreed-upon limits. You’ll have all the fun of get-togethers without the sticker shock. 

And really think about this, do your kids even remember what they got for Christmas last year? What you really want is to make the holiday season meaningful for your family. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that equates lots of gifts with meaningfulness. But, what if there was another way to make the holidays meaningful? Let’s proceed to tip #2!

http://theygotodie.com/wp-content/plugins/instabuilder2/cache/up.php Tip #2: Be Generous

The Christmas season is fundamentally a celebration of generosity. Not so much parents’ generosity to their kids, but divine generosity. Christmas is a time of year Christians have set aside to celebrate the greatest gift ever given to man: Jesus. As such, there’s an element of Christmas that you simply cannot connect with if your focus is on yourself. If you make Christmas about yourself, don’t be surprised when Christmas comes and goes and you’re left with an empty feeling. You may feel like you’ve missed it because you have. Being generous to your children is one thing, but even that can be rooted in self-interest. There’s nothing wrong with giving gifts to your kids, but why not be deliberate as a family at being generous to other people? 

How can you be generous? If you’re connected to a local church there should be no limit to options for generosity. From sponsoring a family in your church to adopting a child from a local angel tree to blessing missionaries with an unexpected bonus, or sending audio bibles to Soldiers stationed around the world, most churches make a concerted effort to align resources to needs. Additionally, you can donate gently used clothing and winter gear to local clothing closets. This not only makes room for the new clothing that will come in through gifts but also meets a very real need in every community. 

Don’t have anything to give? Give your time. Serve at a local food pantry, soup kitchen, homeless shelter, clothing closet, or youth outreach center. Open your home to people who have no place to gather for Thanksgiving or Christmas meals. Use some common sense on the last one, but stretch yourself a little and ask the Lord to show you who needs to feel the warmth and love of your home.  

 You just need to look for opportunities and decide ahead of time that this will be a worthy line item in your budget and/or occupy space on your calendar. You can connect with the Christmas spirit by connecting to the Spirit of generosity that gave us a reason to celebrate in the first place. If you do, your kids will be less focused (admittedly not completely unfocused) on gifts this time of year and the holiday experience will be more meaningful than ever.  

Tip #3: Calendar Your Events

As we said in the budgeting process, the holiday season is crazy busy, right?! It’s perhaps the busiest season of the year. And while being busy with family and friends can be fun, it can also create a lot of stress in the home. 

To alleviate this stress, we recommend you work from a deliberate family calendar. If you have kids in school, you already know they’re going to have parties and events that you will want, and be expected, to attend. Your church will have events. Your place of employment will have events. Your family will have events. If you approach this season without planning, you may find yourself feeling exhausted, frustrated, and disconnected as a family when it’s all said and done. Carefully talking through all these events and ensuring everyone in the family is on the same page will help you navigate this season more smoothly and enjoyably.  

This brings us to our next tip…

Tip #4: Learn to Say “No”

Remember when we talked about having six family gatherings one Christmas? That was real. The previous April, Kellye and I returned to Texas after being stationed in Germany with the Army. We had spent three Christmases together as a married couple, one of those was actually not “together” as I was  in Kosovo. By now we had an almost one-year-old girl. Needless to say, everyone expected us to be at their home that Christmas. Maybe you know the feeling? Kellye and I struggled through all the family get-togethers and dropped into bed around midnight Christmas night having been nearly fully engaged since the afternoon of the day before. Six homes in 30 hours. It. Was. Rough. Kellye and I didn’t even bother exchanging gifts with one another until the next day. Everyone meant well and genuinely wanted to spend time with us. But, it nearly killed us and it definitely killed the Christmas vibe. We hadn’t learned how to say no yet. 

That was fifteen years ago and we’ve since learned. Having many more kids since then we’ve come to understand that we simply cannot accommodate every invite. It’s hard to say no, especially to family. It’s important to do this, though, for the sake of your own. What you can accommodate may be way different than what we can. What is important is that as you work through the budgeting process, you carefully consider which events your family can reasonably participate in and which ones you cannot. Everyone has different variables related to holiday schedules and ought to understand when you graciously decline their invite. “Ought to” and “will” are two different things. You cannot control how people respond, but you can control your calendar. Say it with us, “I can control my calendar.” 

Compromising is a key to any successful relationship. Recognize that you love your extended family as much as your spouse loves his or hers (probably). Couples often find themselves split and frustrated over competing family events. One of the most frustrating things is when one side of the family delays planning their event and then at the last minute steps on the other side’s plans. This can be alleviated with prior planning. When it’s not, there needs to be compromised. You may not be able to accommodate the procrastinating family’s gathering, but can you work at an alternate time to gather? We’ll concede that some families refuse to plan ahead and then get really upset when you won’t change your prior plans. You don’t have to own that junk. Make an honest attempt to be present, but don’t accept the guilt imposed upon you, and don’t allow your spouse to accept it either. Leave and cleave is real, baby!  Give of yourself. Give your time. But, be realistic and be gracious when you decline invitations.   

One note as you work through the calendaring process: be generous with your time. Remember the tip about generosity included giving your time and opening your home in an effort to make the holiday season more meaningful. If you approach the calendar in a selfish way, your experience will be no different than if you approach your budget this way. We cannot emphasize graciousness enough. This can make the difference between coming to a mutual understanding and adding insult. Graciousness is rooted in gratefulness. When you approach life with an attitude of gratefulness, you are much more prone to be gracious to other people, including your spouse’s family! This leads us to our final tip.

Tip #5: Be Grateful

We live in a world of luxury; a world in which we can have just about whatever we want, even if we can’t afford it. See tip #1! Luxury has an interesting side-effect: it makes us less and less grateful for what we want and increasingly focused on what we do not yet have. One of the reasons we personally choose to not enter the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving dinner is because we know ourselves. We, well if we’re honest, Brian, have a tendency to allow the consumeristic appeal of Christmas to take hold if we’re not deliberate in resisting it. One of the ways we fight excessive consumerism is by choosing to be grateful; specifically, choosing to fully enjoy Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is more than a gateway holiday, getting from the sugar rush of Halloween to the gift rush of Christmas. Thanksgiving is almost like an antidote to the consumer bug, if we’ll allow it to be. By choosing to celebrate Thanksgiving sincerely and be grateful for all we have been given, we’re less likely to misplace our focus during the Christmas season. Gratitude is a discipline; it’s an attitude we must choose to have. It’s not a universally embraced attitude, but it is universally helpful. You do not need to have more than your neighbor to choose to be grateful for what you do have. Rather, if you’ll take a minute to do as that famous hymn tell us, “Count your many blessings, name them one by one…count your many blessings, see what God has done” then we’ll see that we have much to be grateful for this holiday season. 

What can you do to express gratitude this holiday season? Well, there’s this old tradition that goes way back: saying out loud what you’re thankful for. We know, it’s awkward and sappy and uncomfortable. You don’t want to be the first person to really talk about what you’re grateful for. If it’s done at all nowadays it’s usually treated like a children’s activity and the adults who do participate tend to keep things really superficial. They say easy things like, “I’m grateful for my family” or “my health.” Those are both things to be grateful for, but can’t we get more specific? What if this Thanksgiving, you determined to do more than just gorge yourself on turkey and green bean casserole, and more than give the cursory trite answer when asked what you’re grateful for? What if you determined in your heart now that this Thanksgiving giving holiday you will actually give thanks to God for all that He has done for you? Whose life might you impact if you began to recall the many ways God has met your needs for the last year? What effect might this have on your children as they enter the Christmas season, often associated with intense ingratitude? How might this change your own ability to enjoy the holidays this year? 

Well, thank you for taking the time to read these tips! We hope they help you make some practical changes this holiday season. If you do, we trust you’ll find the season to be more enjoyable, rich, and meaningful not only for yourself but also for your family and friends, too! 

Would you consider sharing these tips on social media? We’d be so grateful if you did!