An Anti-Burnout Holiday Strategy

By the time this month’s article hits your inbox, we will have been in the ever-expanding Christmas season for many months. My local grocery store began displaying Christmas items in October, which showed some restraint, actually, since Home Depot had Christmas decorations out in August.

Parents typically get a particularly strong dose of mandatory Christmas activity, what with gift buying, crafting, school events and performances, and the fairly recent but very popular Elf on the Shelf. Experiences in the workplace differ widely, but often those who don’t celebrate Christmas aren’t allowed to opt out. A non-observing client once told me about coming back from lunch to find her cubicle had been decorated against her will. And of course, if you work in retail, it’s been Christmas since at least the day after Halloween.

If at this point you are feeling a little ragged or guilty for not enjoying everything the culture says you’re supposed to enjoy, you’re not alone. We’re in a culture that seems convinced that the way to make something more meaningful is to do more. This doesn’t just apply to Christmas. We do this with virtually every holiday. We also do it with vacations, weddings, birthdays, etc.

I’ve written before about how our default cultural values are the values we unconsciously align with unless we have consciously chosen something else. So unless we’ve really worked to parse out what’s important to us about this particular Christmas gathering, or New Years party, or family vacation, we’re going to fall into the cultural default. In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker writes, “When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering.” She argues that we’re in a cultural default when we consider only the type of gathering (e.g. Christmas party) and not the purpose for gathering. “A category is not a purpose.”

I suspect that a lot of our holiday burnout is related to a lack of purpose and uncertainty around what’s important to us.

When we don’t know exactly what’s important, everything on the culturally prescribed list seems important.

While it seems counterintuitive or even downright heretical to say this in our present era of late stage Capitalism, often the way to make an experience more meaningful is to do less not more.  I’m not advocating for any particular form of less. I’m advocating for less of what actually doesn’t feel important to you or your loved ones. It may take a minute to figure out what that is. And if I could give you a any Christmas gift this year, I’d like to give you permission to value what you value , rather what the culture says you should value.

So take a few minutes sometime today and reflect on what feels important to you this time of year and what doesn’t, then see if there is anything you can decide not to do, decide to devote less energy to, or let yourself off the hook about in general.

Better yet, forward this to a friend or family member and have a discussion together about what you might want to do less of.