Managing Holiday Stress by Overcoming the Perfect Christmas

So many of us associate this time of year with managing holiday stress. Let’s be honest, how many of us both loved and loathed Thanksgiving preparations? It's only one day, but many of us worked as early as the weekend before to get ready.

Christmas is up next, and the pressure is on. Holiday joy gets taken over by searching for the perfect Christmas present, preparing to host our extended families, traveling, and pressuring ourselves to make this year worth the wait after quarantine Christmas last year. So whether this is your first Christmas trying to go ‘back to normal’ or you need to do another quarantine Christmas, this holiday season has more pressure than past years it seems, and those weren’t a cakewalk either.

That’s a big burden to bear… so don’t. This year, it’s time to let go of the mythical, ‘perfect Christmas.’

Why do we want the perfect Christmas?

After Thanksgiving, every Hallmark movie, advertisement, and social media post is full of beautiful red, white, and green décor, smiling family faces in matching sweaters, and gourmet-looking holiday food. We all look at those scenes and think to ourselves, “That’s what everyone expects me to do this year.” We try to live up to the picture society painted of what time with our family ‘should be.’

It makes sense that you want to host the best Christmas that you can. You want every present the kids open to be magical, your mother-in-law to compliment the meal you made, and the best pictures to capture what the holidays are all about: making memories.

Doing anything less than the absolute best feels like giving up, like you’re not investing in those memories, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Perfect Doesn’t Exist

I hate to tell you this (that’s a lie, I love telling people this), but perfect doesn’t exist. The picture social media and marketing companies push to us as what Christmas ‘should be’ is a scripted photo op. Everyone is posing to get that perfect-looking Instagram post. Even if it looks candid, most of the time everything you see was planned down to the very last detail to make it look just right.

Does the view look pretty? Of course, that’s the point. 

Was it worth the stress they endured to get things just right? Most likely not.

Was it required to make a great holiday? Absolutely not.

So you can have a great photo op for Christmas, get your mother-in-law to compliment the dinner, and get knock-out presents that everyone will love – but at what cost? If you are so focused on scripting everything to go exactly to plan and managing holiday stress, you’re not going to have the capacity to even enjoy it.

You can’t do it all – and actually, you can have a much better Christmas if you don’t try to.

Imperfect is Better Anyways

That ‘perfect Christmas’ is not only a well-marketed myth - it actually is extremely dull. If you’re looking forward to embracing a boring Christmas, by all means, strive for perfection. But most of the best memories come from unpredictability. Manufactured moments don’t turn into memories, just pictures. An honest moment where people are their wonderfully unpredictable selves often makes a moment too good to forget.

Let your kids surprise you with the silly traditions they start.

Give your partner the freedom to go off-script when the extended family is over.

Let yourself sit down and enjoy the meal and conversation instead of slaving away in the kitchen.

The moments you remember most tend to be the ones that brought joy you didn’t expect. Your best, imperfect Christmas is waiting for you to put down the to-do list, make new and unexpected traditions, and relax this December.

It might feel weird at first, but I think you’ll find that your future self will appreciate the year you relaxed, stayed present, and made memories instead of manufacturing them. So stop chasing a myth and embrace the imperfect Christmas. It could be your best one yet!