Dear Parents, Holiday Traditions Change, and That’s a Good Thing

Dear Parents,

The Holiday Season is upon us. Halloween is around the corner, Thanksgiving will be just around the corner from that, and then there’s the gift giving December holidays (our family celebrates Christmas). Your family probably has a series of holiday traditions it celebrates, some inherited from your own childhood, others that were created when you became adults with your own households, and even more when you became parents. Traditions are important, but there’s a really important thing we need to stop and remember: traditions do not need to make your family miserable. 

Every year I see heavily burned out parents who feel overloaded during the holidays and struggling with feeling like they’re a hostage to two sets of traditions and holiday demands. The parental units want this, the in-laws want something else. For blended families it gets exponentially more challenging. The end result often becomes that a time of the year that seems like it should be about holidays and fun is just a series of increasing guilt trips, frustrations, and exhaustion. Why do we keeping choosing this option over and over on purpose? We’re grown-ups, and there’s a fair amount of things we can opt out of or change to better fit our lives.

We’ve experienced these shifts ourselves. Some of our traditions are changing as our kids age up. While I’m a little sad that my kids don’t live for trick-or-treating like I did, I forced myself to be flexible about it. Last year we participated in a haunted house instead. It was a lot of fun although Younger Geek Child thinks he’d rather trick-or-treat this year (he just doesn’t last as many streets as I did at his age). The teenager, we’ll see. This year he’s content to participate in the Trunk-or-Treat his younger brother’s school hosts so he can also say “hey” to his old teachers. Next year Younger Geek Child will be in middle school, so that tradition will have to be traded out for something else. Teenager may be doing a D&D Halloween session with his friends in the next few weeks. That could possibly become a new thing for him, we’ll see. I am keeping my tradition of a watching of Beetlejuice and eating Halloween candy though, I love that one.

Thanksgiving has long been a change in our house. We like it simple and low-key because that’s what we’ve needed. My mother-in-law and her husband have joined us several times on an open invitation, but we’re okay if they end up with one of my husband’s brothers or doing something different altogether. We like the no guilt trip, no obligation way we’ve handled things and for now, we’ll stick with it until it doesn’t work for us anymore.

Christmas is going to be the biggest change up this year. Younger Geek Child is in the know this year so the Elves are being retired from nightly shenanigans after seven years of antics. I did agree to set them out with the Christmas things this year for nostalgia though. Our boys traditionally got a single Santa gift that was shared between them. We asked them if they wanted the same sort of thing this year. They agreed to it, and the Santa gift is really more of a cool joint gift for the both of them now. With certain things off of our list now, there may be room for new things. We’ve talked as a family about getting to do more baking as a family for this year as my husband enjoys baking as a hobby, and our kids like the idea of getting to do more baking this year. I’m excited to see what it looks like.

The point is, we’ve had to learn to be flexible. There were years we did travel for holidays until it became too much for us. There were years we did more activities and others that we did less. We adjust and adapt. There’s probably things about your holidays that you really do want to keep in place and that’s totally okay. What I’m trying to remind you to do, is to really consider the things that are a must do versus optional and with the optional items, give yourself permission to adapt or drop things as necessary to work for you and your family. You deserve to enjoy the holidays.

Elizabeth,

The Mom Who Wants to Look Forward to Holidays