Tips for Beating Holiday Stress

The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is filled with joy, visits from old friends, marathon shopping trips - -and unbridled stress. Depression rates soar when stress levels become unmanageable. Here are a few suggestions to help you get a handle on holiday stress:

- -Lower your expectations. We’ve all seen the Currier and Ives prints chock full of blissful, snow-filled perfection…a scene replete with families visiting one another via horse-drawn sleighs and neighbors with ear muffs and hand warmers standing at your door singing Yuletide carols.

I don’t know about how it is in other parts of the country, but here in Maryland, snow can bring a holiday event to a grinding halt. Actually, rain can do it, too, but during the holiday season we count on freezing rain, ice and snow. Now as per the Currier and Ives scene, snow for the season should be a wonder to behold. Again, that’s only in theory. Just because we can count on the weather, it doesn’t mean we know how to deal with it. The morning after a decent snowfall, the beautiful white powder has been churned into dark brown sludge courtesy of the holiday travelers trying to get back and forth from the mall.

The moral of the story: fiction is nice, but it’s still fiction. Keep your expectations reasonable and enjoy things as they are. The little things you whine about today because they put cut up that Currier and Ives scene will be the very things you will reminisce about at future holiday gatherings.

- -Keep the meaning of the season at the forefront of your mind. When you are in the malls, fighting with the grandma next door over the last Tickle Me Elmo, keep in mind that the season is not about Elmo.

Regardless of your spiritual leanings, make it a point to take back the ethereal quality the season should have. You can get caught up with griping about how the season isn’t what it used to be, but the truth is, it never was that way entirely. It’s a frame of mind, and entirely within your control. Take control and take away the stress. That’s how it works.