The other night, after we had eaten supper and were all still gathered around the table, I brought out the Holiday Control Journal. I asked the kids and Joey to help me fill out the pages on our family’s food, decoration and activity traditions for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was also interested to know if there were anything that anyone would rather not do during this holiday season, since that was a category in the Holiday Control Journal.
It was really great fun to hear everyone calling out the food traditions. And everyone was quite enthusiastic about our activity traditions, too. Clara started a conversation about gift-giving, noting that, with her wedding coming up and everyone’s finances being challenged as of late AND the fact that our family is only continuing to enlarge, we might want to re-think how each person has traditionally gifted every other person in our family. We kind of tossed around the idea of each person writing down a list of specific things that he or she would like to receive as Christmas gifts, including very budget-minded items that others might not think of (for example, Joey said that he would like a new toothbrush, which would, theoretically, be in most everyone’s budget). Margaret mentioned that writing down what she would like makes her feel greedy. But, I also pointed out that when someone desires to give her a gift, it is helpful to that person to know of things she would really like to receive.
All in all, we got a great start on making this Thanksgiving and Christmas season stress-free.
Tags: Holiday Control Journal
365 Days with Flylady 
October 25, 2009 at 9:23 am |
🙂 Some years ago me and my step-siblings and siblings in law decided to stop gifting each other. It just became expensive after a while. Now we only have presents for our parents, grand-parents and the children which are only 2 so far. It took away some stress and we all concentrating on just spending some time together. It was awkward the first year but now it works really well.