Here's permission to do what you want this holiday

Since I publish my posts in Wednesdays, I am on the eve of ALL the holidays this year - Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Self-care is what everyone will peddle during the holidays to help you survive the holidays. But if you’ve been reading, you know that I believe that type of self-care is a myth, used to distract us from true self-care and to keep us abandoning ourselves. But for this week, I’ll stop beating the drum and instead dive into holiday mode.

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When I was a child, the holidays were a mixed bag in my family. While my mother went all-out with decorations and gifts and tasty food, all catered to each of our tastes, creating magic and anticipation around each corner, my father complicated the celebrations. He was the wild card. Inevitably every year, he would blow up in anger directed towards us. It was so predictable that you could script it.

It was usually on Christmas Eve, when we all had a free day from school and work. He would suggest “doing something as a family,” which meant going to the movies together, one that he had picked out but that we were less than thrilled about. No one could agree on the movie and we were less than enthusiastic about forced family time, pretending that we were a big happy family. My father’s desire for a specific type of family fun, usually an idyllic Norman Rockwell version, created an unrealistic expectation on the rest of us. And when we did not respond as he expected, we let him down and ruined his plans. His unrealistic expectation set him up for being disappointed and for directing that disappointment to us (can you sniff out the codependency?).

This was the baggage I brought into my adult life. In the early days of marriage, my husband and I traveled to my parent’s house for the holidays. We didn’t have much money to celebrate on our own, and we felt the codependent pull to be with family on the holidays. We noticed however that when we spent time with our families, it put a strain on our marriage. In 2013 we dared to consider another plan.

My husband and I needed the permission to do what we wanted for the holidays. To leave the obligation behind and carve out traditions for ourselves. To embody the holidays in ways that respected our energy and our sensitive nervous systems. This was permission we had to give ourselves, because if you asked anyone else, they would have preferred for us to keep visiting family and make the “sacrifice.”

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I will never forget the first holiday that we went on a trip together, just the two of us. We flew to Albuquerque and drove to Santa Fe. We stayed in a quaint inn with a cozy room and fireplace, just outside the old town square. Instead of a family Thanksgiving dinner, we had reservations at a fancy restaurant, where we sat among other couples, drinking wine and eating a pre fix menu. It was sublime! No family dynamics, no conflict, no pretending that we all got along. No noisy children, no obligation. We were free to do as we wanted. We walked the old square and window shopped. We bought Christmas decorations at a local shop. We lit the fireplace in our room and watched classic films. We watched the snow fall outside and savored each moment.

Since then, we discovered and built our own traditions over time. Some traditions are adaptations of family traditions, but some have been a detour, personally cultivated by us. We have added more activities and rituals with each year. We even have his and hers traditions (baking cookies for me, symphony for him).

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Here are the holiday rituals we have created:

1. We’ve curated a holiday movie list that we go through every year. We start with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (my husband’s favorite) on Thanksgiving and follow it up with all the classics - Christmas in Connecticut, Home Alone, The Bishop’s Wife (Cary Grant version only). I have a checklist to make sure we get to all of them. It’s our special thing that we do together, that fills us with joy, and extends the celebration.

2. During our travels throughout the year, we collect ornaments to place on the tree. Every year as we decorate the tree, we reminiscence about trips taken to far off places. There is Big Ben that we purchased from Harrod’s, and an angel from Sainte Chappelle in Paris, two bears in a kayak from Alaska, and painted eggs from Salzburg Austria.

3. I watch cheesy Hallmark movies, the kind you would never pay to see in the theater. Despite the predictable plot and cheesy acting, I relish the anticipation these movies create, as the days count down to the New Year, gravitating toward the mystery ones, where there is some puzzle to solve, usually with a literary theme. Bonus points if there is a cat in the film.

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4. I bake the family recipe of spritz cookies, that troublesome and quirky cookie. It doesn’t feel like Christmas without them. I also make pumpkin breads, zucchini breads, and lemon yogurt cake (if the lemons on our tree ripen in time).

5. We decorate as early as we can. Screw the waiting-until-after-Thanksgiving. Often our holiday lights go on the roofline in October (partially because we get a discount if we do it by Halloween).

6. My husband usually sneaks the Christmas playlist in to our car rotation early in November. Both of us have assembled our respective playlists and the lists grow each year as we stumble on to new holiday albums. Bonus points - we listen to Michael Buble’s holiday album every year as we decorate the tree.

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7. We drive through neighborhoods and gaze at the lights. Our neighborhood goes all out, so we bundle up (yes it gets cold in the desert at night) and take an evening walk to admire the handiwork.

8. My husband requests to attend the Holiday Pops each year at our symphony. I have lost count how many years we have attended. It always gets us in the holiday mood and we grab a  dinner afterwards at a local French restaurant (gotta love matinees showtimes!).

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Our traditions probably aren’t that much different than yours. Celebrating the holidays is a collective experience we share, even if the specifics of celebration are different. What is important is to give ourselves permission to do the holidays the way we want.

Here is permission to do what you want. Permission to break tradition and start your own. Permission to leave the things from the past behind that no longer serve you.

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What do you need to reclaim for yourself?

Is there a new activity or tradition you want to try out?

What permission do you need?

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