Have you ever been tired just by thinking of all the things ahead?

As much magic and fun as the holiday season are, for moms, it looks more like a marathon: from cookie baking to trying to decorate half as well as Instagram home-school gurus. From finding smart, ethical presents to juggling family gatherings and activities, home-schooling parents see their mental load explode at the end of the year.

All this commotion generates a lot of emotions. The big one for moms is stress. And for the kids it’s excitement. How perfect! As an overwhelmed, trying-to-get-everything’s-done mom, we need excited kids!

Holiday Season’s Big Emotions

There is a saying that Christmas isn’t a season, it’s a feeling. From my experience, since I became a mother, my feelings were mostly stress and self-sacrifice.

How did I end up, last year, cooking, cleaning, and decorating while the whole family was enjoying the snow and riding sleighs in the sun? It seemed like a good idea at first, getting everyone out and releasing some of the excitement out of the house as well. Some much-needed silence to think clearly and organize the dinner and celebration. But, alone in the house, working in a frenzy, running up and down the stairs, it felt quite lonely and sad.  I wish I had thought things through better and found a way to avoid the stress that got me to throw everyone out in the first place.

How Fun Can Turn Into Stress

You can definitely remember that until just a few weeks ago, you were looking forward to celebrating Christmas and enjoying all the bliss of the end of the year. But, as the holiday season closed in, you started to make endless to-do lists in your head and you could feel the stress building up in your chest.

Stress is a natural answer to external pressure, and the holiday season can be quite demanding. First, you have the social pressure, like movies, shops, ads, neighbors. Marketers always show us a magical Christmas, with tons of lights, an amazing meal, and happy, loving families. I think that most of us feel like being a good mom means offering such a Christmas to our children. We want the best for them.

There is also family pressure. This one is big. Whether because you have a large family and everyone wants to have you over (you usually end up running around or disappointing people, or both), or because you’re expected to host the family gathering (how to fit and satisfy everyone is still a big question). Maybe you don’t have a family, or you’re not close to them (you may even feel guilty towards your kids for not offering them the perfect Christmas fantasy). Finally, there is a pandemic and you probably won’t be allowed to see your family this Christmas (and you’ll have to deal with everyone’s chagrin).

And last but not least, there is your very own, personal pressure. Who better than ourselves to make us feel like we’re not enough? Be honest, tell me if you are thinking one of those things:

• I have to decorate the house.
• I have to find meaningful, yet fun presents.
• I have to put together meals.
• I have to compensate for the pandemic.
• I have to create a Christmas feeling.
• I have to think of some great activities.
• I have to remember to add some spirituality to the mix.
• I need a haircut before the holiday.
• I have nothing to wear.

Between the cultural and societal pressure, the family pressure, and your personal pressure to be the ideal mother, there is an abundance of sources for stress.

 

Join our 10 days challenge and start your holiday stress-free

 

How Excitement Can Turn Into A Nightmare

You’ve known this moment: When Christmas dinner is about to happen, you are cooking frantically, trying to supervise the setting of the table, losing your ingredients in the depth of your fridge, answering your husband billion’s questions (he’s trying to help), and as you think you cannot get more stressed, your children barge in the kitchen, run 4 times around the room and leave in a cloud of excited and playful screams, just to do it all over again 3 minutes later…

Excitement is a positive and powerful mechanism. Children use it when there is an overflow of emotions they cannot deal with. Obviously, Christmas and the holiday season, with so many emotions and tensions, bring its fair share of excitement.

 

If excitement is a beautiful natural mechanism that helps children grow and manage their emotions overflow, as parents, we don’t always feel that way. Excited children are noisy, messy and restless, they don’t listen anymore and can’t stay still (or quiet!).

[Tweet “#Children use #excitement as a pressure release valve”]

During the holiday children get less sleep, they are overstimulated, and there is energy in the air. All the ingredients for endless excitement. If you go back to all the sources of stress listed before, add some excited, noisy kids to the mix and you’re heading for another exhausting holiday season!

How Love Was Somehow Lost Along The Way

Christmas is a celebration of light and love, sharing, and generosity. When the holiday season is over, how many of you feel bliss and gratitude, not for what Christmas brought you, but because it’s done?

When I wake up, on the 26th of December, I often feel like I missed something. As if a big promise was not kept. As if our modern, commercial, frenzy Christmas had nothing left of its original meaning. After all, How can eat as much as we can feed our spirituality? How can spending outrageous amounts of money show our generosity and care for our fellow man? How can using a month of electricity in a week celebrate the light and hope of our hearts?

We are letting appearances guide our choices a little too much… Because, truly, how is a perfect turkey or a mountain of presents a meaningful depiction of the ancestral celebration of light and the birth of Jesus Christ?

It would be beneficial to step back and breathe, to re-think our Christmas and re-prioritize our values.

Deal With The Holiday Season’s Big Emotions

It is not only the kids who get caught in a spiral of emotions during the holiday season! It may be a family celebration but the societal weight is heavy. Mostly because Christmas has become such a commercial stake in our capitalist culture. Because companies and marketers want you to spend money, they show you how they think Christmas should be celebrated. And if your kids don’t have it all like in the movies pr ads, you fear that they will be disappointed.

Holiday Season’s Emotions And Marketing

Keep in mind that 3 of the most powerful tools in marketing are fear, shame, and guilt. In an article about this topic, searchenginejournal.com explains: “So, to effectively use guilt in marketing one needs to tie into a perception of wrongdoing”.

Can you see now how you are being advertised an amazing and magical Christmas, and how when you end up feeling unable to make it happen, it means you are being sold something? Who said that factory-made decorations were more beautiful than home-made ones? It is not by accident if the time of the year where you feel most overwhelmed with emotions and stress is also the time of the year where the advertisement is at its strongest.

The media sends you a mix of eagerness, expectations, perfect family moments, pressure, guilt, fear of failing, shame, magical lights, and love stories altogether. It is quite normal that your emotional scale goes up and down. Did you know that Coca-Cola’s famous Christmas ads have been unofficially starting the holiday season since 1995?

So, one first question you can ask yourself when you feel overwhelmed by emotions at this time of the year is: is it an inner emotion or an external (induced) emotion?

Holiday Season’s Emotions And Idealization

Between all those images of a perfect holiday season and your beliefs about Christmas, you have quite a lot of pressure on your shoulders. We all have a fantasy of Christmas and we would love for our children to have the most beautiful memories ever.

I remember my Christmas as a child vividly. We would go to my grandparent’s place and it ended completely crowded. With 4 daughters, 4 sons-in-law, and 8 grandchildren, it was busy indeed! So the adults would squeeze in the kitchen for a glass of white wine while my grandma tried to cook in the crowd. We would eat filet mignon with a morels cream sauce, noodles, and roasted carrots. There was a little Christmas tree in the dining room where all adults could barely fit, so we kids ended up eating at the kitchen table.

I’m not saying that my grandma necessarily felt pressured to prepare everything while yelling at my grandpa for him to bring more chairs and glasses. But, I am saying that a great way to spend a beautiful holiday season is to take a moment to remember what is important to you at this time of the year.

I can’t remember one single present I received during those Christmas. But I remember my grandma losing it for people to leave her kitchen, my mom and aunties doing the dishes, everyone talking too loud, my grandpas playing old Christmas songs, and us children, forgotten (and delighted of that fact!).

Another question you can ask yourself is: What makes Christmas special to you? What is the essence of it?

Holiday Season’s Emotions And Meaning

When you know WHY you celebrate Christmas (a real reason, not lets-do-it-like-everyone-else) and WHAT makes it special to you, it is way easier to decide and organize HOW you will celebrate.

Often, what makes us tired and discouraged are meaningless things, because we don’t get nurtured by them. We spend energy but we don’t get anything in return. On the contrary, when you do something meaningful, even if it’s demanding, you end up with more energy than when you started!

What happens if you get down that meaningless road? You will spend time, energy, and money on something hollow. You will end up tired, disheartened, and frustrated. All those negative emotions will feed each other in a spiral until your holiday season is ruined.

Know why you do things and check that those reasons are powerful enough to boost your energy level.

When my kids ask to bake Christmas cookies, even though I can foresee the mess, the arguments over the cookies’ shape, and the huge amount of sugar, I do it graciously. Because I know WHY I’m doing it. Beyond the practical benefits of learning to cook, bake, measure, and be patient( DIY home-schooling check!), I value the time I will spend with my children, together as a family, making something together, and eating it later. I want my family values to make me dance with joy, THIS fills me with energy!

[Tweet “A meaningful #holiday season will feed you #energy”]

Take Them One At The Time

The end of the year is usually an emotional roller-coaster. On top of the holiday season and all the emotions that come from organizing such an important celebration, we also make assessments of the year (personally, family-wise, homeschooling-wise, life goals-wise,…) and old wounds tend to surface again as we are more vulnerable.

A thing that can be hard for many people is that during the holiday season, we miss our departed loved one more dearly. This is a time of celebration, of sharing, and of family gatherings, and we feel the emptiness left by the missing ones. As always with emotions, letting them out is better than burying them. Express your feelings to your family, don’t let them wonder why you’re so sad or angry. This way, you will avoid spiraling and you will teach your children a healthy way to deal with emotions.

When you feel overwhelmed, you can always step back. Breathe deeply and look at things with objective eyes. Is it as bad as it seems? Are you adding to your misery by using negative self-talk? What is the first step to making things better?

As I said, the holiday season is a very emotional time of the year. Marketers didn’t invent it. In ancient times, when Christmas was called Yule, and it celebrated the return of the sun on the winter solstice, it was a celebration of hope and light. When something ends, and something else starts. It can feel overwhelming.

Make the best of your holiday season by acknowledging that it is an emotional time, that a lot is happening with the pandemic, and that there is a lot of social pressure. But, you are conscious of all this, and you can take the time to step back,  make time for yourself and your own needs, decide what’s important or not, and enjoy what should be the brightest, most hopeful time of the year.

 

Join our 10 days challenge and get ready for your holiday season, inside out!