Making Nourishing Holidays

The holidays can be a really special time in the world. As Andy Williams reminds us, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” But if we’re being honest and transparent, the holidays can be a really challenging time. The pandemic and social isolation have only made it more challenging. Something that I’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks is how to create nourishing holidays. Especially right now.

Early in my marriage, my family had 4 sets of parents to visit during Christmas—both my and my wife’s parents are divorced. We were getting pressure from all of our sets of parents, because, naturally, they wanted to spend time with their children and grandchildren. While they didn’t intend for it, their external expectations made it hard for us to navigate the holidays as a young couple. It was stressful on both of us and it left us feeling spread thin. However, it also helped us come up with some helpful strategies to create a more nourishing holiday season.

A good first step to practice is awareness. 

Take time to consider the kinds of experiences you want to have. Reflect on previous holidays. What has left you feeling filled with gratitude, light and joy? Respectively, what has left you feeling drained, anxious and out of alignment? Pull out the nourishing moments. Re-create these connections and transfer this energy into future moments. You don’t have to do this alone either. Invite your friends and family into these conversations too. 

Next, I encourage you to plan. 

As you become more aware of what you do and don’t want out of your holidays, you have to put in the work to make it a reality. We all love our families, but lots of uninterrupted family time can also present its challenges. If you feel like you may run into a challenge, plan to have someone you can call (a lifeline!) to help you recenter and reconnect through moments of distress.

While 2020 has been a year of immense chaos, it presents an opportunity to begin new traditions and practices that can benefit the changing world we’re navigating. So use this holiday season to be creative and innovative. 

If you have a long drive to visit family that you usually dread, how can you jazz it up? Something that my family started to do was to read inspirational stories and listen to Christmas music. It filled the time and it put us in a positive headspace before we reconnected with our family. 

I know that many people have been feeling hopeless given the injustices occurring in the world around us. Instead of focusing on the negative, create change. This could look like doing a small toy drive with your family and Facebook friends, or raising money to donate to a cause you care about. 

The takeaway from this is that you have a choice. 

Of course, there will be hard times and the holidays can amplify them. But, we do not have to focus on the negative. We do not have to let darkness take over. 

Find the light. And create goodness rather than waiting for it to show up.

That said, we’re all human. We have good days and bad days. For many of us, the holidays can bring up emotions of sadness. We might be thinking about those we aren’t able to celebrate with this year. I’ve been thinking more recently about my grandmother and my father who are no longer with us. This has brought about happiness through the memories we shared together, but it’s also brought up grief and pain in wishing that they could be here with me in the present.

A common misconception is that we have to be joyous and happy all holiday season. I disagree. It’s important to give yourself space to feel your emotions fully. Be in your pain. Be in your joy. Don’t restrict yourself to just one emotion, because that’s not realistic. It will set you up for failure. Instead, plan for those moments of upset. Identify someone you feel comfortable talking to about this (maybe it’s your same lifeline that you identified before). 

As we head into holiday celebrations, I want to leave you with the most effective advice I’ve used to make the holidays nourishing... Make it a season. 

You’re probably thinking, “duh,” but this is not how our culture currently views the holidays. We spend so much time trying to make one or two days perfect that we miss out on the true magic of the season. 

If we approach things from this “season” perspective, we can take more time to focus on the light and joy that the holidays can bring us, even in the whirlwind of 2020. If the holidays have stressed you out in the past, I encourage you to change your perspective and treat the holidays as what they really are: a season of gratitude, reflection, connection, and transformation. 

I hope that this advice helps you make the most out of the last few weeks of 2020. I’ll talk to you all in the new year!