Yes, as you can tell by the title of this post, I have a love/hate relationship with the holidays. I’ll start with the positive. I love the traditions that I’ve made with my family. They are not all the same ones that I grew up with, but I’ve created some new traditions with my own children that we have grown to love and celebrate. For our Thanksgiving dinner, we have added a sweet potato dish, just the basic one with marshmallows on top, that we all enjoy and my daughter has taken on making it. My son loves to make the pumpkin pie, and over the years does it all on his own. We’ve also added a corn pudding dish to our dinner menu, that we didn’t eat before. Another thing we do is eat later that we did when we went to our families to have dinner. My mother always wanted to eat at 3:00, and same with my husband’s family. It was always a hassle trying to please everyone and get to each side of the family for at least part of the dinner. Now that we celebrate at our house and I am the main cook, we eat closer to our normal dinner time which gives us plenty of time to get the meal cooked without stressing. These may all sound pretty basic to you, but these are traditions that are ours, not all inherited from our family, and I love that we have made them our own.

Another thing I love is the closeness I feel to my kids since we’ve started celebrating with just the four of us. They are both adults now, and our small family celebrations have brought us closer. At first, I thought it was kind of sad that it is usually just the four of us for the holiday celebrations. We have Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and often New Years dinners together. I think it has created a stronger bond between all four of us, and we don’t feel the pressure to do things that we don’t enjoy. We just relax and watch movies or play games. On Christmas Eve, we always have a nice dinner and open our pajamas before bed. Sometimes after a drive around the neighborhood to look at the lights, we watch a movie or play a game. On Christmas morning, we open our gifts under the tree as we drink coffee and eat cinnamon rolls. As for friends and family, we do still see them, but instead of trying to fit it into one or tow days, we schedule low stress dinners or lunches out at nearby restaurants. This is often on a weekend before of just after the holidays.

As for what I hate about the holidays, it is not necessarily anything specific. And hate is such a strong word. I just really dislike the pressure and stress that comes with the season. As you can tell by my previous paragraph, we have kind of broken off the habit of celebrating the holidays with our family that lives nearby. There was always so much pressure to buy gifts for everyone, which at some point in our lives stretched our budget too much. I was always worried that a family member wouldn’t like the gift, or that they would spend so much more on me, then I would feel bad. Also having both sides of our family living near, it was difficult to schedule time to spend with them that would work for everyone. So now we make a point of getting together with friends and family, on a different day, usually at a nearby restaurant which makes it much simpler than getting together at one of our houses.

So what I’ve learned is that it is most important to just relax and enjoy the holidays with my loved ones with no pressure. I love to see my kids happy, and I love to buy them gifts that I know they will enjoy. They don’t ask for much, so it is the little surprises that I give them that make me happy. I don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations, or be jealous of their Facebook and Instagram posts. I can just be happy and grateful for what I do have. I’m not saying that everyone should cut off celebrating holidays with their extended families, but in my case it was the only way to keep my sanity during the season. I’ve learned that how we celebrate the holidays doesn’t have to match anyone else’s celebrations. I’ve learned that what makes me and my family happy may not work for some, but it does for us and that is all that matters.