If you’ve known me for a while, you know that I have an interesting relationship with the holidays. I enjoy winter and Christmas. I like the cold weather, warm comforting food, fairy lights, dark nights and mornings. Celebrating Christmas growing up was difficult. I invariably ended up having to manage my parent’s emotions, the chaos of celebrating Christmas as a full family of 6, and fixing whatever disaster my parents managed to bring on themselves. It was stressful, with very few bright spots in the mix of it all.

Then I became estranged. Holiday season was still stressful, but mostly because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was expecting something terrible to happen that I would have to fix, so I couldn’t relax at all.

Lockdown helped in a weird way, because there was little I could do, so it meant there was fewer things to go wrong. It did mean I was with my thoughts a lot, which didn’t help, because I was still recovering from years of familial nonsense.

I still catch myself having vague feelings of dread, almost 10 years on. It takes a while to fully unlearn mechanisms that kept you feeling safe, and sometimes it’s so easy to fall back into those mental grooves that I don’t realise until I connect with myself and realise I’m anxious about something I’ve worked to make sure won’t happen again.

I want to put together a new surviving the holidays resource, taking what I published during lockdown and updating it with things I’ve learned in the intervening six years.

I’d love to hear what you’d like to see of what you’d find useful, and I’ve got a google form for people to respond to (you can also comment, email, etc)

I’m looking forward to approaching this with some intention, and hopefully publish something (or hold a workshop, or maybe a peer support group) that people can use to look after themselves and feel less alone.

To get it started, here’s a list of things I’ve done to get through the holidays, and the things I’ve learned from them.

1. Been determined to enjoy what I can and not worry about the things that are inevitable, but out of my control. Enjoy what I can, when I can, and deal with the fallout as it comes.

   The thing with this is learning how to balance distraction and not wallowing with running away from your worries. I would pile up activities to avoid spending time wallowing, which left me exhausted when it came to actual festive stress. The time I had to deal with stress was harder, leaving me drained.

2. Tried to control as much as I could

   This never really works. Controlling things you have to and actually have control over? Fine. Trying to control more outside that and failing because that’s not possible just means more pressure, the illusion of more things going wrong because of your failure.

3. Tried to disconnect as much as possible

   This works well, if you can actually do it. Forcing yourself to not care when you do can lead to some cognitive dissonance, and can be exhausting. The mantra should be more about you only doing what you can and trying not to worry about things you can’t control, not about being entirely unaffected.

4. Set a virtual countdown so I could see just how long it was until I could leave

   This was useful in the sense that I could see the time I was in that environment was finite and time was in fact moving forward. Limited usefulness, but there nonetheless

5. Set up something to look forward to after the holidays

   Something to look forward to is never a bad thing.