Before the holidays really get going, I want you to consider making a different kind of list.
Not a gift list or a grocery list. Not a list of everything you need to accomplish before December somehow arrives. I want you to make a list of what you are not doing this year.
Most of us do not start asking what can come off the list until we are already overwhelmed. By then, we are tired, irritated, spending more than we planned, trying to squeeze one more thing into an already full weekend, and wondering why a season that is supposed to feel meaningful has started to feel like something we need to survive.
Then, of course, we tend to blame ourselves. Maybe I should have started earlier. Maybe I need a better system. Maybe I should be more organized. Maybe everyone else is handling this better than I am.
But sometimes the problem is not how efficiently you are doing the holidays. Sometimes you are simply trying to do too much.
Holiday Stress Often Starts Before the Holidays
The pressure of the holiday season is not imaginary. In a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, 89% of U.S. adults said something causes them stress during the holiday season, and 41% said their stress increases during this time of year. Financial pressure, finding the right gifts, missing loved ones, and family conflict were among the concerns people reported (American Psychological Association, 2023).
The same survey found that 38% of adults who experienced holiday stress reported using at least one negative coping strategy, such as isolating themselves, changing their eating habits, or relying on substances to help them feel better (American Psychological Association, 2023).
I do not think most parents need a statistic to know this time of year can become a lot. You can feel it in the calendar before you even get to Thanksgiving. School events are still happening. Sports and activities have not stopped. There are gifts to think about, people to see, plans to coordinate, food to make, travel to arrange, and traditions that somehow assume you have a completely separate set of hours available for them.
The rest of life does not politely move out of the way for the holidays. Work still happens. Laundry still happens. Children still need rides, homework help, appointments, food, and attention. The holidays get layered on top of an already functioning life.
That is why I think it is worth making some decisions before you are desperate to make them.
Traditions Can Matter Without Becoming Obligations
I love family traditions. There is something meaningful about having things that belong to your family and repeat over time. A particular meal, decorating together, visiting someone you love, making something your kids look forward to every year, or even a ridiculous tradition that would make no sense to anyone outside your family can become part of how your family tells its story.
There is research behind that. A long-standing review of family routines and rituals found associations with areas including parenting competence, child adjustment, and marital satisfaction, while also noting limitations in the research and differences in how rituals were measured (Fiese et al., 2002).
In a longitudinal study of New Zealand families, the meaning adolescents and parents attached to family rituals was connected with greater family cohesion and adolescent well-being (Crespo et al., 2011). More recent research with 109 Portuguese married couples with children found that greater meaning attached to family rituals was associated with better quality of life and lower parental burnout for both partners (Lisboa-Lima et al., 2025).
I think the important word in all of that is meaning.
The research does not tell us that families need more traditions. It certainly does not tell us that the parent who creates the most elaborate holiday wins.
It gives us a reason to ask which traditions actually mean something to us.
Because there is a difference between something your family treasures and something you are dragging everyone through because you have always done it.
When a Tradition Stops Feeling Like a Tradition
Sometimes a tradition slowly becomes an obligation, and nobody really notices when it happens. Maybe you host because you have hosted for ten years. Maybe you bake six kinds of cookies because your mother did. Maybe you send cards because you have always sent cards. Maybe you go to several different family gatherings because saying no to any one of them feels too complicated.
None of those choices is automatically a problem. You may genuinely love doing them. But it is worth asking whether you still do.
Families change. Children get older. Work changes. Relationships change. Health changes. Financial circumstances change. Sometimes what worked beautifully five years ago simply does not fit the life you have today.
Changing a tradition does not mean the tradition was a mistake. You can be grateful for something and still be finished with it. You can love hosting and decide you cannot host this year. You can care deeply about extended family and decide you are not spending an entire holiday driving between three houses. You can love homemade food and decide something is coming from Costco this time.
There is no prize for maintaining every tradition at exactly the same level of effort forever.
Sometimes the Hard Part Is Letting Someone Be Disappointed
I think this is where many of us actually get stuck.
It is not always that we cannot figure out what to remove. Sometimes we know exactly what we would like to stop doing. We just do not want to disappoint anyone.
Maybe your parents expect you to come. Maybe your extended family assumes you will host. Maybe your kids expect the holiday to look exactly the way it always has. Maybe someone will make a comment if you buy the dessert instead of making it yourself.
Because disappointment feels uncomfortable, we keep saying yes.
But sometimes setting a limit really does mean someone will be disappointed. I think we need to say that more honestly.
Boundaries do not guarantee that everyone will think your decision is wonderful. Someone may feel annoyed, hurt, confused, or disappointed. Their feeling does not automatically mean your boundary was wrong.
The question is not, How do I make sure nobody is disappointed?
The question may be, Is preventing this person’s disappointment worth what it is costing me and my immediate family?
If saying yes leaves you exhausted, resentful, fighting with your partner, snapping at your children, spending money you do not have, or dreading the entire season, that belongs in the calculation too.
What Do You Actually Want the Holidays to Feel Like?
Before deciding what stays and what goes, it can help to ask a different question.
Not, What do we normally do?
Not, What does everyone expect?
What do you actually want this season to feel like?
Maybe you want connection. Maybe you want fun. Maybe you want more time with extended family because you rarely see them. Maybe you want your kids to have a few traditions they remember. Maybe you want a quieter year. Maybe this has been an incredibly hard year, and what you need most is simplicity.
There is not one correct answer.
The point is to know what you are trying to protect. When everything feels equally important, everything tends to stay on the list. Once you know what matters most, it becomes easier to recognize the things consuming energy without really contributing to the experience you want.
Maybe decorating the tree together matters enormously to your family, while the elaborate neighborhood light tour does not. Maybe Christmas morning at home is something you want to protect, while attending every single December gathering is not.
This is not about stripping the holidays down until nothing is left. It is about making enough room to actually experience the things you decided to keep.
More Is Not Necessarily More Meaningful
I think parents can get caught in the idea that doing more makes a holiday more special. More gifts. More events. More decorations. More traditions. More experiences.
But children are not necessarily measuring the season the way we are.
They may remember the pancakes you always make, the movie everyone watches, their grandparents laughing at the table, staying in pajamas longer than usual, or some tiny tradition that happened every year and made home feel like home.
The research on family rituals is useful here because it points toward the meaning attached to rituals rather than simply how many activities a family manages to fit in (Crespo et al., 2011; Lisboa-Lima et al., 2025).
A meaningful tradition does not have to be elaborate, and an elaborate tradition is not automatically meaningful.
Sometimes the person creating all the magic is so busy producing the experience that they barely get to participate in it.
I want you to get to be in the holiday too, not only be the person making it happen for everyone else.
You Do Not Have to Wait Until You Are Miserable
This may be the part I most want parents to hear.
You do not have to wait until you are completely overwhelmed before you take something off the list. You do not need to prove that you are exhausted enough. You do not have to wait until you snap at your partner, cry in the kitchen, or realize you have scheduled something every night for two weeks.
You can decide ahead of time that something is not worth what it costs.
The APA's holiday guidance makes a similar point about realistic expectations, encouraging people to identify what actually matters rather than trying to take on everything (American Psychological Association, 2023).
That can feel strange if you are used to responding to stress only after you reach your limit. We often give ourselves permission to stop only when continuing becomes impossible.
But you are allowed to make room before you run out of it.
Try a Holiday Audit
Before your calendar fills completely, take a look at what normally happens during the next couple of months. You do not need an elaborate worksheet. You can sit down with your partner, open the calendar, and start talking.
Ask yourselves:
Do we actually enjoy this?
Who is doing the work to make it happen?
What does it cost us in time, money, energy, and patience?
Would anyone in our immediate family genuinely miss it if we stopped?
Are we doing it because it matters to us or because we are afraid of disappointing someone?
Could we make it simpler and still keep the part we love?
Sometimes you will look at something and immediately know it stays. Great. That is useful information too.
The goal is not to eliminate things simply for the sake of having an empty calendar. It is to become more intentional about what gets your family’s limited time and energy.
There are also a lot of options between doing something exactly the way you have always done it and getting rid of it completely. Host dessert instead of dinner. Buy the cookies. Draw names instead of buying gifts for everyone. Travel every other year. Attend one gathering instead of three. Leave one weekend open. Ask someone else to take over something you have always managed.
A tradition can evolve without disappearing.
What Might You Get Back?
We talk a lot about what we lose when we say no. We might disappoint someone, miss an event, give up a tradition, or do something less impressively than we have done it before.
But I think it is also worth asking what you might get back.
Maybe you get back an afternoon. Maybe you have enough patience left to actually enjoy your children. Maybe you and your partner are not snapping at each other while trying to get everyone out the door. Maybe you spend less. Maybe you sleep more.
Maybe your family sits around longer after dinner because nobody has somewhere else to be. Maybe your kids get a version of you who is actually there instead of mentally running through the next fourteen things on your list.
Doing less does not automatically make the holidays better.
But sometimes it creates enough space for the things that make them meaningful to actually be felt.
Before You Add Another Thing
So before the holidays really get busy, I want to leave you with one question:
What am I not doing this year?
Maybe there is a tradition that needs to change. Maybe there is an invitation you are going to decline. Maybe there is something you are going to buy instead of make. Maybe someone else gets to be disappointed.
And maybe your family gets a little more of you because of it.
You do not have to earn a calmer holiday by first becoming completely overwhelmed. You are allowed to make room before you run out of it.
If you would rather listen to me talk through this, you can watch my companion YouTube video, Holiday Stress: What You’re Not Doing This Year.
And if you want to go a little deeper into holiday expectations and the pressure to make everything feel perfect, you may also like my earlier video, Holiday Peace Isn't About Perfection, It's About This.
References
American Psychological Association. (2023, November 30). Tips for parents on managing holiday stress. https://www.apa.org/topics/parenting/holiday
Crespo, C., Kielpikowski, M., Pryor, J., & Jose, P. E. (2011). Family rituals in New Zealand families: Links to family cohesion and adolescents’ well-being. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(2), 184–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023113
Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.16.4.381
Lisboa-Lima, M., Nguyen, T.-M., Hasse, I., & Crespo, C. (2025). Family rituals and quality of life: The mediating role of parental burnout. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 51(2), e70005. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.70005
About Catherine O’Brien
Catherine O’Brien is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Sacramento, California, and the founder of Happy With Baby. For more than 20 years, she has helped moms and couples navigate overwhelm, grief, disconnection, anxiety, and the relationship changes that can come with parenthood. HappyWithBaby.com |Book an Appointment