By Lynne Silva-Breen, Spiritual Reflections

Welcome to “The Holidays.” You thought you might escape them this year, but no such luck. What begins as piles of Halloween candy at the grocery store in early October soon morphs into flocked plastic trees lining the tight walkways of your favorite store a month later, and before you know it, Christmas carols are heard all over the radio. Then your children’s band and choir concerts and your spouse’s workplace party fill the kitchen calendar. What’s a thoughtful, reflective adult to do?

Lynne Silva-Breen

I have thought of escape, too. But escape to where? The best antidote I’ve been able to come up with for this holiday avalanche is to allow less commercial media into my life. I try to listen to fewer television commercials, immediately recycle the pounds of catalogues we receive daily, listen to public radio, and limit – fiercely – the amount of money we will spend on ourselves for Christmas. Yet while this is modestly do-able, I want to write about the other aspect of the holidays that is less under our control, and genuinely more difficult. And that is our extended family get-togethers.

All of us have family. We come, each of us, from some human group – large or small – that was responsible for our moving safely through childhood. Some of us have pleasant, healthy memories of people – parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings, neighbors – whose lives wove in and out of ours. Others of us have less salutary memories of these family members, and have spent the better part of our post-adolescence trying to distance ourselves from the people of our past.

Yet, it’s these people who have shaped the narrative of our lives. And many of them have different memories, very different, of those same times in our lives. What may have been distant and anxious for us is somehow serene and lovely to them.  Siblings who share the same parents may not even understand their brother’s or sister’s experience of the family; it is so different in the telling. All this makes getting together years and years later so hard. Whose past are we celebrating, anyway? Mother’s? Dad’s? Mine? Or a grandparent’s vision of whom we were supposed to be? 

I have just a few modest suggestions for us all who will be participating in family gatherings during the early winter holidays. Here are four suggestions which I hope can get you through your time with “family” with a lighter spirit and less anguish.

1. Lower your expectations.  Family members who don’t gather any other time during the year often think that Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s obligates them to have a party or dinner together. There are good emotional reasons you don’t naturally reach out to each other in April or August. Those reasons don’t magically evaporate in the dark of winter. But connecting once a year is helpful to maintain the ties that hold families together. Just don’t expect everyone to understand you, or have the same values or goals as you. If you can attend your family function with the primary purpose of participating or showing up, you will experience a great deal less stress.

2. Do a lot of listening. If you listen to others stories, jokes, comments and ideas more than you expect them to listen to you, you will accomplish three things: you will learn a great deal about the folks you call family, they will appreciate your gracious listening, and you will be a whole lot less disappointed when no one seems to listen well to you.

3. Drink in moderation. Nothing fuels the emotional transition from current anxiety or disappointment to pent-up anger and old hurt like too much alcohol. More family functions explode because people self-medicate with alcohol, forgetting that it’s not only a depressant but an anti-inhibitor. People lose control of their emotions and their tongue. Don’t be one of them.

4. Shorten the time you’re together. Make those family dinners just a few hours long, and people can manage. But make them all-day affairs, and it’s not only the kids who’ll need time-outs. Get outside for awhile, take a nap, disappear into a good magazine or book, or watch a bit of TV. The current relationships can’t sustain all that proximity anymore. And if you’re flying to a family gathering, be sure to stay at a hotel nearby. It’s worth the expense.

Whatever your family obligations this winter holiday season, see them for what they are: rituals that can help us hold emotional connection to those who are our relatives, for better and worse. They don’t have to hold all the weight of the world within them. Just enough.  

(Rev. Lynne Silva-Breen, M.Div., M.A., has been a Lutheran pastor since 1984, is a family therapist/pastoral counselor and can be contacted at www.inspiringchange.us [2]. She is one of several area pastors who write columns for "Spiritual Reflections.")