Christmas holidays can be
the best of times or the worst of times. For many, it’s both—a season of great
food, family, and gifts mixed with enough stress to push you right over the
edge.
Thanksgiving and Christmas
holidays tend to magnify both the blessings and the problems in our lives. And
so we are reminded of and confronted with all the reality (good and bad) that we
tend to forget or try to ignore during the rest of the year. About mid-November
the excitement and the anxiety gradually begin to rise.
The holidays are stressful
for everyone but especially for those of you whose parents are separated.
Rcpo wrote: The hardest part of my christmas is having my family not
being together
Tyler wrote: The most difficult part of Christmas for me is being rushed
between my parent's houses. I feel bad about leaving one parent for the other
For those of you who have
doing this a few years, you know of issues:
- Parents picking
up where they left off criticizing the other and trying to recruit you to their
side
- Parents
spending money they don’t have, trying either to work off their guilt or to buy
your affection
- One parent
getting offended because you spent one-half day longer with the other
- Opposing
families arguing about where you will go and when
- Your Christmas
plans being determined by some legal document
- Anger about
what the separation has done to your holidays
Just when you think things
can’t get any more complicated, separated parents remarry, and you have to deal
with all the steps — stepmother, stepfather, stepbrothers, stepsisters, and
even “step-relatives.” I read about one couple in their second year of
marriage. Negotiating their holiday plans with their separated and remarried
parents became so stressful that they had to see a therapist to cope with the
pressure.
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We are reminded of and confronted with all the reality (good and bad)
that we tend to forget or try to ignore during the rest of the year.
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Anna wrote: The most difficult part of Christmas is spending it without
my father or any of his family being around. I don't know any of my mother's
family so gatherings are extremely awkward. Holidays are just all around
extremely lonely and depressing for me; I just don't find happiness in them
anymore
The Thanksgiving and
Christmas seasons are all about ideal families getting together. And so, during
these holidays, kids with separated families can’t avoid feeling some sense of
loss.
Stephanie
wrote: Probably the
most difficult part of Christmas for me is seeing how much things or life in
general have changed from one year to the next and how things can never be as
they once were
Situations vary based
several factors: 1) how well parents have been able to deal with their own
issues and how well they have adjusted to the new normal; 2) your age and
independence, 3) the distance between parents, and 4) enforceable divorce
settlements regarding the holidays.
So, facing (what is for
many) the dreaded Christmas holidays, here are a few tips that might help:
1) Get ahead of the competition. Make
your Christmas list and encourage parents to go in together. In other words,
try to get rid the competition between them. It may sound good at first having
parents competing to buy your loyalty or to make up for what the separation had
done to your life. But it will eventually backfire on you. The extra stress
between separate parents (which will certainly find its way to you) is not
worth the extra stuff.
2) Set some boundaries of your own. Typically,
parents get together and agree on boundaries they set for their children. The “rules
and boundaries thing” for kids with separated parents can get really crazy,
especially when it comes to the holidays. Because it can be such an explosive
issue, holiday plans are often spelled out by lawyers with great detail in
divorce settlements. As you get older, you are going to have more ability to
set your own boundaries. Again, it’s good to get out in front of the conflict.
Make your travel plans around the mid September
and let everyone else work around. Too late for that this year, but make
a note.
Don’t give up on the
holidays too quickly. Of course, you could get angry and make a pronouncement,
“Okay, here’s my boundary: I’m just not coming!” But before you abandon
everything and everybody, use boundaries to try to make things work. For
instance—“We’re coming, but we’re not
going to listen to or participate in conversations that run down the other
parent.”
Should your boundaries be
deal-breakers? By that I mean saying, “These are the condition, or I’m not
coming.” Maybe so, maybe not. You’re going to have to feel that one out
yourself. But if you set boundaries, make sure the conditions are considerate
of others and not self-centered demands.
3) Get the focus off all your problems. Several listeners and readers commented that the most difficult part of
the holidays for them is being aware of people who have far less.
Zack
wrote: The difficult part of Christmas for me is knowing that there are less
fortunate kids out there that don't get Christmas
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Even when family members can find nothing to agree on or no happy
thought to share, they can always find someone in greater need—someone you can
all feel good about helping.
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If you dread the Christmas
holidays because they are so materialistic or because they highlights aspects
of your family that anger or depress you, try this: Start a new tradition by
getting as many in your family as possible involved doing something for someone
less fortunate. There are lots of ways to do this. All of you volunteer to
serve a meal at a rescue mission. Everyone fill a Christmas shoebox for
Samaritan’s Purse. Get involved with Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree by
providing Christmas gifts for the children of prisoners. Find someway to give
to those in your community and ask relatives to join you. Even when family
members can find nothing to agree on or no happy thought to share, they can
always find someone in greater need—someone you can all feel good about
helping. It just requires someone to take the lead, and it doesn’t have to be
someone from the older generation.
Most opportunities to help
others during the holidays are not spur-of-the-moment kind of things. It will
take some thinking ahead. Starting a tradition of giving can transform
something that has lost a lot of it’s meaning (like Christmas holidays for
separated families) and turn it into something that has even greater meaning—something
you can feel really good about together.
Here’s a
question for next week. Do you get
bored over the holidays? What do you do with so much downtime?
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