Holidays are great occasions to take a break from the
normal routine, relax, and catch up with family and friends.
Unfortunately, for many people whose lives are already too hectic,
holidays become just another stressor to add to the list. Now that
you're organizing your family's schedule, holidays can return to being
the happily anticipated special days that they were when you were a
child.
Choosing the Holidays You'll Celebrate
The list of holidays
you can celebrate in a year is virtually endless; a quick review of a
common calendar will give you at least 20 possibilities. Every religious
tradition comes with its own array of both major and minor holidays.
Ethnic heritages—yours or someone else's—provide you with more choices.
You won't want to overlook national holidays either. Plus, there's a
growing array of miscellaneous secular holidays as well. Some holidays
have been extended to entire seasons.
caution
Even holidays
with extended seasons need to have a beginning and an end. Unless you
own an all-year Christmas store, Christmas decorations have no place in
the Easter season. Allowing yourself to keep any holiday's decorations
up too long, no matter how you rationalize it, takes away from the
special nature of that holiday and the ones that come after it. If you
find holiday decorations fading into the background and escaping your
conscious thought, then use your planner to stop yourself by making sure
that when you put up the decorations, you also schedule a day and time
to take down the decorations.
Your goal, as always,
will be to please the most people in the family without making anyone
feel overwhelmed. Start by listing the holidays that your family has
always celebrated. Don't be hesitant to make everyone take a closer look
to see whether there is any holiday on this list that no one feels the
need to celebrate because sometimes everyone in the family outgrows, or
needs a break from, the same holiday at the same time. Next, look to see
whether there are any holidays the family would like to add to the
list. Just remember to be selective because you can't have the time and
energy to celebrate everything.
Of course, you can
make the festivities as elaborate or as simple as you would like. For
an extensive holiday season, you might include indoor and outdoor
decorations, handmade crafts and home-baked goodies, dinners, parties,
community outreach activities, elegantly wrapped homemade and
store-bought presents, and so on. At the other end of the spectrum, your
commemoration of the holiday can be something as simple as serving
green gelatin for dessert on St. Patrick's Day.
Incorporating the Holidays into Your Family's Schedule
The challenge we need
to address here is no different than all of the challenges: how to make sure that the activities you select
can be incorporated into your family's schedule for the best time with
the least amount of stress. And the method for doing that should be
becoming familiar to you:
Decide what your family wants the result to be—which options will be included and which won't.
Stop for a reality check to make sure your plans aren't too ambitious. Modify them, if prudent.
Make a list of what needs to be done to achieve your planned results.
Break
down the list into components as simple as you need to ensure that no
step will be overlooked. Don't forget preparation and wrapping up.
Estimate times and assign people to each component to create a checklist.
Schedule the items from the checklist into the family schedule.
tip
Holiday
accessories—decorations, serving pieces, and the like—can take up a lot
of space, not to mention time to maintain. Sometimes simplifying what
you have can actually open the door for more creativity. Consider
acquiring a few basics that can serve you well on multiple holidays. A
good example is a plain red tablecloth. It will be just right for
Christmas (maybe with green napkins), for Valentine's Day (white or pink
napkins), and any national holiday (white or blue napkins). Your
choices, both in terms of how often you can use the tablecloth and in
terms of specific holiday decorations, are so much greater than if you
opted for holiday-themed tablecloths for each occasion. |
Look at Figure 1 to see how one family might plan its observance of Halloween. You can use the same technique for any holiday.
