Letting the Holidays Be Ordinary Some Years

There was a year, a few winters back, when I simply did not have it in me to do the holidays the way we usually did. It was not one dramatic reason. It was a pile of smaller ones, a demanding season at work, a kid going through a hard stretch, general tiredness that had been building for months. When the holidays arrived that year, I felt a familiar dread rather than the anticipation I usually associated with the season.

I remember standing in front of the closet where we keep the decorations, trying to decide how much energy I had for pulling them all out, and realizing the honest answer was not much. That was the year we let the holidays be ordinary, and it turned out to be a more important decision than I expected at the time.

What ordinary looked like that year

We put up a modest amount of decoration, far less than usual, just enough to mark that the season had arrived. We simplified the gift giving considerably, focusing on a couple of things each child actually wanted rather than trying to fill out a longer list. We said no to a few gatherings we would normally have said yes to, choosing rest over social obligation in a way that felt uncomfortable at first and then, surprisingly, did not.

I worried, going into it, that the kids would notice the difference and feel shortchanged. What I found instead was that they adjusted easily, largely because children take their emotional cues from the adults around them more than from the scale of the celebration itself. A calmer parent hosting a smaller holiday read, to them, as a good holiday, not a lesser one.

Children do not compare this year’s holiday to last year’s the way parents do. They mostly experience the year they are in.

The guilt that showed up anyway

None of this means the guilt disappeared. I still felt a pull to do more, driven partly by memories of holidays from my own childhood and partly by a general cultural sense that the holidays are supposed to be the biggest, brightest stretch of the year no matter what else is happening in a family’s life. That pull did not care whether I actually had the capacity for a bigger celebration. It just kept insisting that I should.

What helped was naming the tradeoff honestly to myself. A smaller holiday done with an actual present parent, or a bigger holiday done by a depleted and short-tempered one. Framed that way, the choice became easier, even if the guilt lingered in the background regardless of which choice I made.

What we learned for the years after

That harder year ended up teaching us something we carried into easier years too. We did not go back to assuming every holiday season had to be maximum effort just because we had more energy available. We started asking, each year, what this particular year actually called for, rather than defaulting to whatever we had done the year before or the year before that.

Some years since then have been bigger, more decorated, more elaborate in the gift giving and the gatherings. Other years have stayed closer to that scaled-back version. The difference has not been about the calendar. It has been about where we actually were as a family that particular season.

Explaining this to kids without over explaining

We have found it useful to say plainly, when a year is going to be smaller, that this year is going to be a simpler holiday, without turning it into a long apology or a detailed accounting of why. Kids generally accept a straightforward statement more easily than they accept an anxious, over explained one. If the adults around them treat the smaller version calmly, they tend to follow that lead.

We also try to ask what they are most looking forward to, and protect that one thing specifically, even in a scaled-back year. If a particular tradition matters enormously to one child, that tradition survives even when everything around it gets trimmed down.

The relief of not needing every year to match

Perhaps the biggest shift has been giving up the idea that our holidays need to look consistent from year to year, building steadily toward some ideal version. Life does not move in a straight line like that. Some years have more room in them. Some years are just harder, for reasons that have nothing to do with how much a family loves the holidays or values being together.

Letting a holiday be ordinary in a hard year is not a failure to celebrate. It is an honest response to the actual conditions of that year, and in our experience, it has never cost the kids the feeling of the holiday mattering. What it has cost is our own outdated idea of what the holiday was supposed to look like every single time.

What stayed the same even in the smaller years

Even in our most scaled-back years, certain things did not change. We were still together. We still marked the day as different from an ordinary one, even modestly. We still paid attention to each other, which turned out to be the part that mattered most all along, more than the decorations or the size of the gathering or the number of gifts under the tree.

That is the part I would want another tired parent to hear, heading into a season that feels like more than they can fully show up for this year. The holiday does not need the full production to still be real. It just needs the people in the room, paying attention to each other, however modestly that attention gets expressed this particular year.