The holiday season officially begins the moment you find yourself tiptoeing down the hall at 1:00 a.m. and doing a stop, drop, and roll drive-by in your child’s room like a ninja to steal some of their Halloween candy.
No sooner than you throw away the pumpkin you carved for Halloween do you find yourself baking pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving. While you’re dreaming about your mother’s cornbread dressing, and your aunt’s macaroni and cheese, an overwhelming sense of holiday anxiety engulfs you.
You suddenly remember the rude in-laws that you’re about to be forced to deal with, the big hit to your pockets for food, gifts, and home décor purchased to impress family and friends, and your ex-spouse that you argue with every holiday about a fair visitation schedule.
The holidays are supposed to be the most joyous time of the year. However, they are often a source of great frustration for many couples. The holidays become stressful for couples because they don’t have honest conversations about expectations and boundaries.
We just celebrated Thanksgiving, so some of you reading this article know exactly what I mean. You’re upset today because you spent Thanksgiving with your spouse’s family instead of yours, or even worse your spouse volunteered to host Thanksgiving at your house without first discussing it with you.
Couples, communication is the key to enjoying and surviving the holidays. This time of the year always means an influx of work for me, as couples start to experience a breakdown in communication because they get stressed, depressed, and frustrated from the pressure of the holidays.
I often tell couples that they have to really work as a team during the holidays. Couples must discuss and agree on where and how they plan to celebrate the holidays, set a budget, and establish boundaries that serve to preserve, protect, and strengthen their relationship.
Share In or Create Our Own Holiday Traditions
Deciding and agreeing on where to spend the holidays is a big decision and can become a source of contention for many couples. Couples need to be open and honest and share what is most important to them about the holidays. Doing so will help to ensure that each of their needs and desires are respectfully addressed and considered when coming up with a compromise.
If spending the holidays with family is very important to both of you, then you have to decide how you’re going to split the time. You have the options of:
- serving as the host and having both families come to your home to celebrate,
- rotating holidays (i.e. Thanksgiving with one family and Christmas with the other), or,
- spending time with both families on the holiday (i.e. Christmas breakfast with one family and Christmas dinner with the other).
If tradition is more important than spending time with extended family, you can decide to create your own traditions with your immediate family. You can also use this time to learn about your mate’s culture and religion especially if their observance of the holiday is different from yours.
Embrace learning something new and jump at the opportunity to combine the best of both traditions and create a special and unique tradition for your family.
If giving back is important to you, you can decide to spend the holidays volunteering or doing community service. The point is you get to decide as a couple what you want to do.
It’s very important that you respect each other wishes, and be careful not to allow external forces to influence your decisions. Simply put, after the turkey is gone and the gifts are opened, you still have to live with your spouse daily, and not the person you let cause a conflict in your home. Bottom line you’re grown…do what works best for your immediate family.
Decide on and stay within your holiday budget
Money issues can really cause a lot of angst and fear in a relationship. The holidays on exacerbates money issues if couples don’t set realistic expectations about spending. Shopping for the holidays can get very costly.
You have to purchase food for family gatherings, gifts for family, friends, co-workers, and teachers, decorations for the home, and airline tickets or car rental and fuel. All of these things should be factored into your budget discussion so that you don’t over spend.
Here are some very common reasons why people over spend during the holidays:
- they are impulsive shoppers
- they are trying to impress someone with expensive gifts
- they purchase out of guilt, and they feel obligated to buy a gift for everyone
We have to learn to recognize these behaviors and understand what our motivation for spending is so that we can make different spending decision during the holidays.
Couples need to create a list of people that they plan to purchase gifts for including their kids and themselves. Once the list is created it should be scrubbed and re-scrubbed to determine if everyone on the list really needs to be there.
Next, couples should set a budget based only on their actual expendable income and not their emotional ties. Your budget should be reflective of what you actually have to spend versus what you want to spend.
Make sure to manage your kids and mate’s expectations when allowing them to create their wish list. Use your creativity when planning and shopping for gift ideas. It is a very good idea to track your spending and reconcile your money and receipts throughout the process to ensure you are staying within your budget.
This will help especially if you and you mate have different financial love languages. Communication and planning will prevent the spender from feeling deprived and micro-managed while allowing the saver to maintain their level of security and sanity.
Couples need to determine if traveling is a realistic and feasible option for the holidays. Don’t go into more debt traveling to see your family. You don’t have to explain your finances to them. However, it is okay to be honest with them and say that travel is not in your budget this year.
They should understand, but if not don’t allow their lack of understanding to become your issue. Remember being shamed or guilted into gift giving or travel can be costly for your purse strings and the health of your relationship.
Embrace the idea that “teamwork makes the dream work.” Don’t be afraid to request that everyone bring a dish to the holiday family feast. Don’t feel like you have to incur all of the expense for the food yourself.
Additionally, don’t decide to do a last minute non-budgeted costly home improvement project because family is coming over. Focus more on creating a wonderfully memorable experience for the holidays rather than a perfect of expensive experience.
Establish and enforce family rules
Family gatherings, especially during the holidays, can bring out the worst in people. Family members get catty, gossip, throw shade, bring up the past, criticize your home, children, cooking, and even the gifts you get them.
You have to decide on the things that are acceptable and what things are totally unacceptable as a couple. If you know that your family or friends are negative and feel that it’s okay to talk to your mate, your home, and your kids any type of way, you have to decide collectively not to invite them to your home or not to visit their home.
There should be zero tolerance of anyone who disrespects you in any way. There is nothing worse than a mate that allows their spouse to be disrespected and humiliated and not come to their defense. Again, your job is to protect your mate, preserve your relationship, and strengthen your family. Remember that holidays are about coming together not falling apart.
BMWK are you doing all you can to holiday proof your relationship?