Reclaim the Spirit of the Holidays

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Nov 23, 2001

Family, love, caring, togetherness, faith, kindness, and gratitude are some of the values we associate with the holiday season. Stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, guilt, anger, fear, and disappointments are often our experiences of them. How did holiday traditions undergirded by such strong values metamorph into such difficult and unhealthy experiences? I can think of three villains immediately: prosperity, emotional manipulation by advertisers/media overkill, and unrealistic expectations. It is the American dilemma that possession of strong values and financial resources make us prime targets for exploitation. And, because expectations are that we should feel and act a certain way during the holidays, if we do not we may find ourselves faking it or feeling guilty.

This article is not about managing holiday stress. Countless articles have already been written about that, several of them I have identified for you. You may have already read a few of them. The fact that so much is written about holiday stress is a telling indicator of the negative impact those times can have on all our lives. The stakes are higher for persons dealing with a chronic illness. Not only are we more susceptible to the negative effects of stress: fatigue, changes in eating and sleeping habits, irritability, and reactive depression, to name a few. But, our recovery from these effects may take longer and could engender more complications than the average person would experience. Sliding into the chaos of the holidays could mean losing the balance and stability that one has worked diligently for weeks or months to attain.

This article is about reclaiming the spirit of the holiday season. My vision for the future is that articles about holiday stress will become obsolete, and that instead, we will share stories about the creative ways we reclaimed and spread the spirit of the season. My belief is that we do not have to accept holiday stress as a given, but that it can be eliminated and replaced by one person at a time, with the spirit of the season.

Until about a decade ago, Halloween was my signal to start circling the wagons and digging in until the chaos of the holidays ended. The meaning of the holidays was over shadowed by the whirl of activity, anxiety over finances, and the fear and guilt of not adequately meeting everyone's expectations. By Thanksgiving, my stress level was already very high, but by the onset of the "official" holiday season, my stress level was off the scales. I finally threw up my hands and admitted that I could not do it anymore. If I had known then what I know now, I would have taken a more gradual approach to reclaiming the spirit of the season.

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