Putting Out Christmas Fires

A Christmas tree set-on-fire popped up in my texts this July after I’d told my close girlfriends we weren’t doing Christmas presents this year. Here was my text (complete with real typos and grammatical errors): we’re actually do a present-free Christmas this year - just a couple of things for Harvey and we’re telling everyone not to buy for us as we’re not buying for them.

I laughed at Steph’s response - it had great text comedic timing - and I understood it, too. First of all, this was in the middle of summer, where we as a family were struggling more with our lack of air conditioning than the pressures of Christmas. Second, I also know that gift-giving is Steph’s love language and she was likely horrified at the thought of eliminating it from her family’s ritual. And yet, even in July, I could feel my nervous system bracing for December.

The idea wasn’t born that day. In fact it was a recapitulation of the previous Christmas’ post-mortem that my husband and I had done. Perhaps like you, I ended last Christmas having tried so valiantly to “do it well,” but ended it with exhaustion and a lack of peace.

The ingredients that made last Christmas feel like a simultaneous marathon-and-sprint are so plain in retrospect: extended family arrived to stay with us for 10 days as soon as our elected break began, and we hosted multiple festive meals for over ten people and children (with multiple allergies and dietary requirements). Just those two dimensions alone have a litany of knock-on requirements within them: heightened cleaning, decorating, meal planning, preparing, gift prepping, snow clearing, dishes, etc etc. And to really implode, pair that with the less tangible but intensely powerful bevy of self-inflicted expectations - everyone gets along, feels included, makes magical memories, feels seen and delighted by the gifts they receive.

Being the sandwich generation (the generation caring for children and ageing parents, and in my case, ageing grandparents, too), means an enormous amount of real and perceived pressure. I love Christmas traditions, and I’m also deeply circumspect about the consumerism the season engenders, as well as the emotional minefield of the season. I have felt conflicted about how to shape Christmas so it comes from a values-based place - and so it doesn’t ask the impossible of me.

One of my clients grew up in Ukraine and was raised in the Orthodox church. She shared that in her childhood, Santa Clause brings a single present for each child and there is no elaborate gift-giving between adults. In response to her own seasonal overwhelm and discomfort with Christmas’ bonanza of stuff, she told her children that elves were on strike in response to unfair working conditions. We chuckled together as she shared about her ongoing work of navigating children’s expectations shaped by media and peers - and her own sense that cultivating an appreciation for “enough” mattered more than pulling off a spectacle.

We tend to learn the same lessons over and over again, because we are the consistent factor and the changing content is the variable. I realized that Christmas had become yet another arena for the lifelong lesson of over-responsibility for other people’s experience. Perhaps you recognize yourself in a similar awareness. I find the greatest joy and meaning in the important relationships in my life, but I also suffer when I do not march to the beat of my own drum. And some of the anthems I am beating my drum to include the belief that we are all doing too much and should do much less (or perhaps, much differently) - because in unexamined reactivity we move toward what we think makes us content and away from what actually brings contentment.

And this is not just my household. As a therapist, and now as a centre director who hears this through my team’s work as well, I watch this pattern intensify each year as we approach this season. Since mid-November, family conflict tends to rise, along with anxiety or depression among children and teens. Adults are ruminating and spinning in their fear of getting it all done, navigating tricky relationships, and yearning to fulfill their seasonal traditions. I also notice a rise in more acute distress - darker thoughts, shorter fuses, thinner margins. That’s the conundrum at the heart of it: there’s a yearning to feel a certain way through the season, but all the apparatus we’ve built to achieve it quashes it.

The stress also sits atop the iceberg of deeper emotions that thrust themselves forward at this time of year - grief for those who aren’t with us anymore, or the pain of estrangement from family members or friends. This is a season ripe for poignant backward-looking reflection as well as looking forward in anticipation and hopes. Speed and quantity are not optimal conditions for digestion and processing.

I could analyze this from a psycho-historical lens for ages. Gift-giving arose in so many previous eras where stuff was precious and minimal. Unfortunately, the tradition has not adapted to the mass-production era, where stuff-management is so burdensome that it has its own self-help shelf at the bookstore - sitting alongside the awareness that our excess has consequences we can no longer pretend not to see.

Forgive me for the momentary lapse into a sense of doom, but these are the worries that I hold for myself, my family, and the world. So as my husband, Alex, and I regarded each other with exhaustion - tucked up on the couch in front of a fire - I said something to the effect of: “I am not doing that again. I personally nor professionally can afford to crash into the new year like that.”

Fortunately, he agreed.

We set our plan for 2025 at the end of 2024 - and that’s why I reiterated it a few weeks after summer solstice. We agreed that since we were the only house in the area who could host, we would. We would convey to our family that we weren’t doing presents, but we would host the big meal and we were moving it from dinner to lunch. We would keep the weekends leading into Christmas to a maximum of one event. Between us, we would do one significant present for Harvey and stockings for each other. If we planned travel, we would caveat to family that we would not drive during significant weather events and plans would have to change or cancel in that event.

As it’s played out, we have routinely acknowledged the increasing pressure - and the difficult feelings - of navigating saying no thank you, and holding ourselves to account. I’m sure we haven’t done it perfectly, but it is feeling good enough.

And here’s what surprises me: the enoughness has made room for the meaningful. We’re doing some of the little things that matter to us - favourite Christmas films, baking cookies, making ice lanterns, visiting my 102-year-old grandmother in long-term care, going for a walk on Christmas day to feed the chickadees. The fact that I even feel inspired and willing to take the time to write this reflection is, to me, a sign of a welcome shift.

Maybe this is your invitation, too. Not to renounce Christmas, or to strip it down to something austere - but to choose the parts that carry meaning, and to let the rest fall away, even if it disappoints someone. Here’s to a season that asks a little less of us, so we can be a little more with each other.

Maybe this is the real present-free Christmas - a little less performance, a little more peace. The kind where a burning tree can stay a meme in July, and not a prophecy in December.