With Halloween over, you’ve packed away the ghosts and skeletons for another year. Now come “THE HOLIDAYS” — that end-of-year marathon of high-stakes celebrations, great expectations, and great stress. The treadmill of endless shopping and baking and decorating and family gatherings beckons so temptingly. The illusory magic, the promise that the ideal holiday — for ourselves and our children — will make up for past disappointments, seduces us all. No wonder we’re tempted to overdo it!
Each year, you pledge to get off the treadmill, to relax your pace and preserve time for what really matters. You want to give your kids meaningful holidays. But you don’t want to compulsively fulfill expectations from the culture or your families of origin. You want to make the holidays your own.
Most likely, your original families bring expectations too. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins — at their best — enrich your children’s lives. But they can also over-fill your holiday dance card. Maybe it’s the annual cross-country pilgrimage. Maybe it’s the post-Christmas party and gift exchange. With traditions from each side of the family, you’ve got to make hard decisions. Do you take turns each year? Forget the past and do something new? Blend parts of the old into the holidays you’re creating now? There’s no right answer. What matters is talking this through together.
Part of the challenge of holiday planning is the backwards pull of nostalgia. We are all, parents and children, pulled back to familiar pleasures and drawn forward to change. During the holidays, this conflict rises to a peak. The holidays feed nostalgia, that longing to return home. You can expect strong regressive pulls—the wish to savor your mother’s meals or lounge around a hearth you didn’t have to decorate—even as you give your own children the magic of the season.
Then, reality intrudes. Partners can really help here, reminding each other of the gap between idealized wishes and realities learned over the years. All families are complicated; the complications just vary by degree. You remember travel stress, your kids’ reactions to interruptions in their routine, the self-sabotage of your better self. Yes, you want to re-connect with your relatives, but you also want what’s best for your family now. There will be compromises as you take in the realities of 2025.
As you’re making holiday plans, here are some things to keep in mind.
Visit length: Allow enough visiting time to warrant the travel hassle, but not so much time that everyone devolves into old conflicts and rivalries.
Protection of family boundaries: Maybe it’s a hotel room. Maybe it’s a walk with your partner, or lunch out with just you and your kids — moments that re-establish your own family identity, that let you check in with each other, and refresh your primary commitment as a couple and a family. These moments fortify everyone for the big family events ahead.
Clear roles between parents and grandparents: You can hold this clarity internally: you’re the parent now. You might at times remind your parents. “Remember to let us be the parents and you enjoy being grandparents.” Then, if there’s an overstep, you can say firmly and kindly, “That’s the parent lane. We’ve got that. We want our kids to enjoy you as grandparents.”
Thanksgiving, first on the holiday roster, brings a valuable message for the whole season. Rooted in traditional harvest festivals, Thanksgiving expresses gratitude for Earth’s abundance and extended family, the fields and the ancestors to whom we owe life.
Gratitude can humble; it’s the antidote to envy and greed. Whether your gathering is large or small, whether you visit family or reflect on what’s missing, gratitude for what you actually have is the most enriching gift. Whatever lack or loss the holidays bring, you can still treasure the experiences of the moment. Comparing yourself to relatives and neighbors can stir envy and an irritable striving for more. Envy spoils celebrating with those who are actually gathered around your table.
No family fits the cookie-cutter ideal. Accepting this with realistic good humor is a gift to your children. No holiday plans are perfect. You can consider your kids’ interests and preferences, but in the end you parents make the plans. Maybe your kids will protest a change that disappoints and doesn’t seem fair. Empathize and then remind them you’ve decided what you believe works best for your family this year. You might be mistaken, but you’ve made the best decision you can with the available information. In January, we can all talk about what we’ve learned from the holidays.
Miriam Voran consults with parents and practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children and adults in West Lebanon and Montpelier. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She lives in West Lebanon and can be reached at Miriam.j.voran@dartmouth.edu.