I thought everyone would be disappointed.
I felt like a grinch, at my breaking point with all the noise, noise, noise. Not audible noise (though I do love a silent night), but the deafening hustle and bustle of the season.
I worried that others would think I was grinchy, that I was doing it all wrong, possibly even that I was depriving our kids. Maybe some do but, truth-be-told, everyone is so caught up in their own holiday frenzy that they likely never took notice of what we were (not) doing.
Now, I have come to a point where I am proud of the fact that we don’t do it all. We have made a very conscious effort to do the holidays our own way — celebrating what is important to us and forgetting about the rest, going against societal norms and setting our own pace.
Year-after-year, we have made changes, small and big, adjusting our holiday traditions until we finally found the joy again.
I am sure, if my kids compare notes with their friends at school, they notice that we do things differently. We do have an elf, (ShuShu was a gift my eldest received as a baby), but our elf never gets up to any antics and only occasionally moves to sit in a different spot. We have never gone to take pictures with Santa. Indeed, we never made a big deal about Santa, at all. He only ever brought our kids one gift and filled their stockings. We never pushed the myth and never lied when asked about the truth. We actively try to minimize the influx of meaningless stuff, buying only a few modest gifts for each other. We don’t schedule special trips to see lights. We don’t bother with gingerbread houses. Our decorations are not elaborate. We no longer host an annual holiday party (which had been a tradition of mine for decades).
The list of things we don’t do is extensive.
I think most of our contemporaries would be shocked to learn how little we do for the holidays. But this I know: The less we do, the more we enjoy it.
The truth is, we don’t miss any of it. What matters is that we are spending time together in the ways that make us feel happy and cozy and full of love and generosity.
We have movie nights cuddled on the couch and hot cocoa with marshmallows. We place importance on time spent together creating memories over accumulating more and more material things. We go shopping to answer letters to Santa from kids spending their holidays in homeless shelters. The last couple of years, our kids’ letters to Santa asked that their gift from him be given to a kid in need, instead.
It took years for me to finally realize that we did not have to keep up with all the demands and expectations of the season. To recognize that we did not even need to keep maintaining the traditions we had always had.
If it no longer brought us joy, we could let it go. We could create new traditions, or better yet we could leave some sweet empty space to simply sit and be and soak in the holidays without any agenda.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, if you find yourself forcing smiles and going through the motions just to put that checkmark on your To Do List, why not try letting go of a few traditions, this year? Have your family vote on their favorite activities and see which don’t make the cut. Find what works for you. It may very well be that you, too, will find more joy in doing less.
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This piece originally appeared at Medium.com, published with permission.
