Demanding in-laws, children, spouses and siblings. Any or all of these can cause you to pull your hair out during the holiday season.
Add this to the financial pressures exerted on your wallet at this time of year and you have a recipe for potential disaster.
With not enough time for everyone and everything, it can be tempting to try and spend your way out of trouble, leaving you with a post-holiday nightmare when the credit card bills arrive.
It doesn't have to be this way.
With a dash of understanding, a pinch of preparation and a heaping spoonful of holiday cheer, you can get through the season emotionally and financially intact. You might even enjoy yourself for a change!
Sit back with a cup of eggnog and let Myvesta's holiday guide light the way to your brightest year ever.
People Like Us
The holiday season can be a time of conflict for couples and a logistical nightmare for families.
Consider what a typical couple experienced last holiday season:
After a fitful three hours of sleep, Mike and Carol B. were awakened at 6 a.m. Christmas morning by the sound of fighting children.
It had been a particularly stressful time for the B's. Married that May, this was the first year they had spent together as a family and it had been filled with numerous arguments over how much they should spend on the six children from their previous marriages, whose relatives they should spend the day with, and what church to go to for the holiday service.
The kids had done their part by continually dropping not-too-subtle hints about which expensive and impossible-to-find toys they were hoping to get.
Instead of celebration, the entire season was filled with tension and headaches for both Mike and Carol and they found their already strained budget stretched to its limit by all the demands being put upon them.
Sound familiar?
Let's see what we can do to make sure you, Mike, Carol and their bunch don't have to go through another year like that.
A Guide to Giving
The most common trap people fall into is over giving. Countless families and individuals spend themselves into a debt from which they cannot dig themselves out.
What is over giving and how does it differ from plain old generosity?
The definition varies, but in general it can be thought of in two ways.
The first definition involves giving something that is out of proportion to your income. A divorced father making £35,000 a year giving his 6-year-old son £1,000 worth of toys for Christmas would be an example.
The second definition of over giving is when the gift is out of proportion to the celebration. An example of this would be the daughter of a millionaire whose mother buys her a new piece of diamond jewelry when she brings home a good report card. In this case, the mother may be able to afford the gift, but it is out of proportion to the reason for giving it.
People typically over give for one of four reasons:
- Guilt - A father who feels guilty about his absences or a mother who buys gifts to "make up" with her daughter after emotional outbursts.
- Competitiveness - Someone from a lower income bracket competing with the expensive gifts her parents and siblings give her.
- Living out our fantasies through our children - An example may be a parent who dreamed of being an astronaut as a child sending his/her daughter to space camp, when the child would much prefer to spend a day with the parent at an amusement park.
- Compensating for some hurt we experienced as children - A parent who comes from an impoverished background may overspend in an effort to ensure that his/her children never feel the pain he/she did as a child.
Over giving may make both the giver and the receiver feel good in the short-term, but is a dead-end in the long run. The giver often feels let down or resentful shortly after the holiday, and children who are overindulged often grow up with unrealistic expectations.
It can be helpful (not to mention economical) to think of the holidays as a season, rather than as a build up to a special day, culminating in the opening of gifts. Like any other major event, it is often helpful to sit down well in advance and develop a plan of action.
For families, this starts with an agreement on what type of holiday experience you want your children to have. Agreeing on how the holidays should be celebrated is not always easy, as partners often have had different experiences growing up, which can lead to very different expectations of how to celebrate the season as an adult.
Before deciding how to celebrate the holidays this year, take some time to discuss what the holidays were like for each of you as children.
- How many gifts were the norm?
- Was there pressure on family members to compete for the best gift?
- Was there travel to relatives or were the holidays spent at home?
- What was your best holiday memory?
- What was your worst?
This conversation can be fun and enlightening. It will deepen your relationship with your partner and can help you to understand why certain traditions are so important to each other.
Whether married, separated or divorced you will find that compromise, cooperation and understanding are key to providing a happy holiday experience for yourselves and your children.
