Holiday Haste + Holiday Waste ~ Be Mindful of your Relationships During the Holidays.

From Halloween through til New Years, we are bombarded with images of houses to decorate, parties to either perfectly host or joyfully participate in, hundreds of gifts to buy, including gifts to have in your closet so you can give a gift to someone you don’t know well enough to buy a real gift for yet have a gift for them if they happen into your home.  Don’t forget all these gifts require wrapping—thank goodness for gift bags and tissue paper.  Food shopping, traveling, organizing pet sitting, and the rest of it.

All this requires us to move at lightening speed and encourages us to spend money.

For some this time of year is delightful, wakes them up, gives them reason to live.  Martha Stewart and Joanna Gaines are likely on this list.  And while they probably enjoyed this before they became icons of ‘how to do it just perfectly’, now they have staff.  Anyway, this isn’t the point.  

The point is that most people are busy —before the holidays.  They become crazed during them.  We can often forget why we are doing these things and spending all this money.   To show the people we care about, how much we care about them.  Hah!

Are you tending to your relationships?

Have you made agreements about what you do during the holidays?  Have you remembered to check in with your partner about the budget (if you share money)?  

If you don’t look after relationships with clear, direct communication, good agreements and agreements about what to do when you haven’t kept agreements, you can find yourself in challenging emotional times during the holidays.  

Try these things to keep deeply connected to the ones you hold dear.

1.  Hold aside time to celebrate with just each other – in small ways during the holiday season.  Sharing gratitudes and appreciations.  
2.  Make agreements about the money (if you share money) so that you can both be relaxed when the spending begins.
3.  Make agreements that work for you both about how and when and where you party.
4.  Create new family rituals and celebrations that have special meaning for you.

Remember the holidays are a time to deepen your bonds and celebrate with those you care about, rather than a time to struggle and suffer through. 

I hope you can find things to celebrate this holiday season.