Holiday Stress.......

Ahhh, yes---the holidays.  "The best time of the year", as the song goes.......

Maybe not....... 

For many folks, it is the absolute worst time of the year.  I speak with a modicum of authority. 

In a previous life, when the holiday season approached, the  dysfunction that epitomized my extended family kicked into action.  This occurred for decades, in one form or another, turning the last three months of each year into a sea of chaos and frustration.

Have a holly-jolly Christmas!

PAST EXAMPLES:   My wife wants to have Christmas dinner at our house this year.  We went to my mom's house last year.  My mom says that is OK, but she wants to bring the pumpkin pie because my wife always makes the dessert and my mom thinks her pie is best.  My wife gets PO'd at the suggestion that her pie is somehow inferior, gets her back bowed and takes a stand that she WILL be making the dessert and my mom and dad are to show up, be nice and leave.  It is, of course, up to me to mediate both sides.  This is not easy, even over over a petty matter like this, because everyone in my family has an ego.

Then there is the matter of uncle Joe insisting on giving our youngest child a gift that my wife has already bought.  I explain this to uncle Joe, but uncle Joe is firm in his stance that the gift should come from him.  I am again caught in the middle, and I ain't happy about it.

Then, wife decides that the children should be showered with gifts (that they don't need or even appreciate) that have to be constructed with screws, washers, bolts, nuts and widgets that are supposedly included with the purchase.  And yet, amazingly, after all these years, I have never seen a package with the correct tools to construct the gift.

OH, Ho the mistletoe!---Kiss 'er once for me!

Grandpa has decided that no one is to buy a gift for him this year because "there isn't anything I need and it would just be a waste of money."

Problem with that is twofold:  his d**n gifts are already purchased, and it is going to be awkward for everyone else to be opening gifts while he just sits there.

Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!

My wife wants to have Christmas dinner at 4:00.  I want to eat at 6:00. My mom says 2:00 is when they expect to be served.

At Thanksgiving, there is always big trouble over when we eat because dad is going to watch the football game and is not budging from his recliner until the game is over.  Then, with everyone starving and ready for food, he says after he has his two vodka and sodas, we can eat.  Behind the scenes, the bickering is of biblical proportions.

The kids got so much "stuff" for Christmas that they appreciate very little of it.  In fact, they gripe about what they didn't get. 

Gotta return about five gifts (returns are sooo much fun!) because they were the wrong size or wrong model or wrong color or defective or whatever.

Frosty the snowman was a jolly, happy soul.......

I can't wait for January 2nd.

Holiday Stress

Cindy and I were still in bed, trying to become fully awake, when the talk turned to the stresses of the holidays.

We both agreed that the stress begins about two weeks before Thanksgiving and builds steadily until Christmas night, when it then begins to ebb, finally disappearing the first week of the new year. 

We also agree that this holiday stress produces feelings of guilt, anger, withdrawal---and in the extreme---suicide.

All of this comes, as the song says, at "the most wonderful time of the year". 

While I love the idea of Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Year's celebrations, the reality is often tempered by tension and stress.

Often, stress is produced by expectations of others in our circle of family and friends.  Sometimes it comes in the form of feeling pressure to do something/go somewhere we don't want to do.  Many times, we agonize over what gift to give aunt Mossie or uncle Jack or brother Bill.

What are your thoughts on this subject?  Do you become stressed at Christmastime?