Recipes for Meaningful --even Happy Holidays

The holiday season is such a mix.  It’s a little bit tricky.  Some look forward to it, and some dread it, some are a mix for sure.  We have been guided into thinking that’s it’s happy time no matter what, and family is the most important thing.  Television and social media mostly tells us how happy we are supposed to be, how much shopping we should do, how to decorate our homes (without consideration of cost).  Just this week I heard on a news report that there is a large percentage of people who are still paying off their debt from their holiday spending last year.  (The credit card companies must be delighted with how much money they make simply by keeping you in debt –augh).  Usually you can find the obligatory what to do when you find yourself struggling article, meme, or 4-minute story.  This time of year can have us thinking there is something wrong with us, given how wildly different the holidays are for us.

Personally, I like Thanksgiving as it is an opportunity to offer reverence and bring gratitude the forefront of our attention.  In my family, when the holiday table was full, there was very little of this.  When I became aware of wanting more offers of gratitude and asked for it, my requests mostly fell on deaf ears and my attempts to do it anyway never got traction.  We ate a lovely meal, which was fine, yet not all of what I wanted.

Over all the years of my life, the holidays were fraught with distress as my parents split when I was young.   Navigating who to spend which evenings with often were met with a great deal of distress and demands.  While I liked the holidays, they became the source of a great deal of anguish. 

Given my experience of the holidays, I wonder if more people struggle in a variety of ways, than actually embrace and enjoy the holidays, even those who express their delight for the season.  There’s not a lot of room made for exploring the nuanced experiences of the holidays.

I imagine there are people that receive no invitations to the holidays.  No family, or estranged completely and friends don’t think to extend an invitation.  Possibly there aren’t people that you might call friends.  A deep feeling of loneliness is what you experience a great deal of the time heightened during the holiday season.

Sometimes we don’t particularly enjoy spending time with our family, yet find other needs met.  Perhaps you experience a deep sense of belonging so you are drawn to be with the family anyway.  Or you care so deeply for your family that you want to be present, yet not for as long as they want you to be.  Perhaps the traditions don’t speak to you anymore and you want to also find time with friends and other close people.  How do you find the choices that optimize all the needs.  Are you required to spend hours, when you want to spend one, before it gets to be too much?

Having lost my parents and my sister, the holidays remind me of them and I find myself missing them more.  There is a melancholy of sorts that inhabit the space around all of it.  I am reminded year after year, that they are not coming back, which, at times, I long for quite a bit.  Simultaneously, I experience weird sense of relief, with not having to buy gifts, just because, or making awkward choices of which holidays to spend with whom.  I have more freedom to do other things on the holidays.  Like I offered above, it is mixed.  I also get to deal with my own (often quite harsh) judgements around how the holidays are offered in the public realm.  Buying gifts for the sake of buying gifts, spending money we might not have because it’s the right thing to do.  Wrapping gifts in paper that will go to the landfill, and the gifts themselves just being things, rather than handmade or something creative, likely ending up taking space in a closet.  I see very few to no offerings in the realms the spiritual side, the earth-based side of what the season is about for me. 

I have even more harsh judgements of handing out food and turkey and gifts on the holidays to people in need, wishing that we attended to these folks in a more meaningful and long-term way.  A mixture of appreciating generosity and longing for more generosity all at the same time.  The holidays are quite a complicated mixture of thoughts and feelings, needs met, needs unmet.

When the holidays are hard, what are your options?  Who is willing to really hear you, maybe even over and over about the particular challenge(s) you are facing this year?  I’m suggesting that you find people you can talk it through with, find connection with, find understanding and care, even if they have a different experience than you.  [As I write this, it’s coming to my mind to create an empathy circle for expressly this purpose].  When you understand your needs, you are more easily able to navigate how you spend your time over the holiday season. 

Holiday time is a perfect time to implement your deepest and best communication skills, honesty in a container of care.  How freeing it is to be able to navigate meeting your own needs while still caring about another’s.  Being able to distinguish yours and other’s needs from the requests (demands) of others and make offerings that demonstrate your care, without making agreements you don’t want to make.  Without descending into arguments and misunderstandings you don’t want to have.

Plan way ahead. 

Give yourself time to explore your options with little or no stress of time management.  If it is ‘too late’ for this year (although why would you think that?) begin with planning next year.  Become quite mindful this year to take notes of what you wished you did so you were having a more fun or meaningful time.  Then get started with your planning.  Do you have a specific journal just for this topic?  Or a section in your journal to keep track of your hopes and what tasks you have completed and what’s left to do?

Allowing your feelings to direct you to what needs you long for will help you determine what experiences you want to have.  Knowing what experiences you want to have is like gold.  You can explore all the options (strategies) you have to create more of what you want.  If you are lonely and receive no invitations, what else can you ask for or offer to the find the community or belonging or sense of purpose you want to have?  If you are longing to create new traditions, how can you manifest it?  Remember to invoke your creativity when considering the strategies that will actually meet your needs.  If you want to be with your family, and set limits to how much time you spend with them, what can you ask for or offer (and when) to set the expectations all around?  If you want to field the awkward and/or awkward questions or topics at the dinner table, what can you have planned to redirect the conversation, or opt out of having it at all?  All of these things are possible.  Have you fallen into resignation about being stuck in an experience you aren’t enjoying?  What kind of support do you need to find your way back to hope and creativity?  If you need some ideas, please comment here and I’ll be sure to check in and see if I have any ideas up my sleeve.