How to Survive & Thrive During the Holidays

Hey, its Leigh Ann here with What’s Up Wednesday. Coming at you from the Rocky Mountains. I’m all warmed up here. It’s a little chilly outside today.

But today I wanted to talk to you about four tips to help you not only thrive during the holidays, but to survive the holidays. How does that sound?

So, I don’t know if this happens to you, but this happens to me, every year, where all of a sudden, I notice there are Christmas lights up, Christmas carols when I’m at the mall. And Christmas seems to be everywhere. And I’m like oh my goodness, holidays are upon us. So I know there’s Thanksgiving tomorrow for our American friends. And you know Christmas around the corner.

So today I wanted to give you four tips to help you survive and thrive during the Christmas season. My favorite season of all.

So the first gift I have for you, or tip, I call them gifts actually, is the gift of gratitude. And I know we’ve all heard to have more gratitude. But I want to give you something practical that you can do with your family during this season. Whether it’s for Thanksgiving this coming weekend for the American people. Or for Christmas. And this is something that I’ve done a couple of times with my family. And it’s been such a beautiful tradition.

So basically what it is, when you have your guests arrive for the holidays, you give them out cards. And these cards, just grabbing mine here, there’s different titles. So it’s like Thank you for…. What I love about you… And if you want to do this at Christmas, you can have My Christmas wish for you is… and basically everybody gets these cards. And you have them fill out one card for each person that’s there. And they don’t have to do it right away. They can do it in their own time. And then, you just have boxes out for each person. Or you have an envelope out for each person. And everybody can fill them out and slide them in to everybody’s envelopes.

The beauty of this is, once you’re done, you can sit down, just in silence, and have everybody look through these gratitude cards from everyone else. It is absolutely precious. We did this years ago on my mom’s side when we had everybody for Christmas. And it was really just a special moment, because guess what? We don’t tell people enough how much we appreciate and love them. And this is just one of those times where you actually just take a moment to sit down and just say, what is it I love about you? Oh, I’m so grateful you have done this for me. And, you don’t have to share it around or anything. You don’t have to write your name on the card. Although people can tell, because they know your writing if they are your family and friends. But, try this out.

So the three things are, what I love about you, my Christmas wish for you is, if you want to do this at Christmas. And thank you for. And you can easily do these up on the computer and print them out and cut them up and have them when everyone arrives. But it’s definitely a highlight.

And I have to tell you, when I bring out all of my Christmas stuff every year, I have all these cards that have been filled out. And I reread them. And it just makes me feel so good. So that’s a nice little boost and something super fun to do.

So that’s the gift of gratitude.

The next thing I want to tell you about is tip number three, actually I’m going 4, 3, 2, 1. I’m saving, well, it’s not really the best for last, but anyway.

Tip number three is the gift of time. During the holidays we tend to be really busy. So, if you can give the gift of time that is awesome. I just want to tell you about a little ritual that I do with my son. And it is something you might want to weave into your ritual. And that’s basically what we do something, similar to an advent calendar. But, we do activities every day, starting December first, leading up to Christmas. Because that’s some of my most favorite times. And it really keeps me present.

So basically, you can do this like an advent calendar. Where you put poster boards together and you have little windows for each day. So December first, second, third. There could be activities for each of the days. What I’ve done, which I wanted to do just to be a little bit more creative and I wish I would have knit these myself. I haven’t. I went on to Etsy, which is super fun. And I got these little cutsie mitted mitts. And I have these clips which have the number of the date for each of them. And then what I’ve done is I’ve created these really cute little cards for my son. So every day, he picks one out of the mittens and they are all activity based. So, we spend time together.

I’ll read you a few of them to give you some ideas. So we give a box of goodies to the neighbors. So we might do some baking, something like that, and drop it off to a neighbor. Or we go tobogganing. We make a gingerbread house, and we usually do this with his nana. She just let me know that she got a Gingerbread house for him.

Go out and make a snowman if you got snow around. Skate on the pond. Because we’re out here on the mountains, we like to go on a Christmas tree cutting adventure. Sing Christmas carols. Do a Christmas movie night, with all the classics. The Rudolph and the Snowman guy, can’t remember his name right now. Frosty! That’s it.

Another thing, make hot chocolate, get in the car, put on the Christmas carols and drive around and look at all the beautiful Christmas lights that people have put up. And make crafts.

I know some of you haven’t celebrated your Thanksgiving, so you’re probably thinking Christmas is a little bit too early. So that leads me to my 2nd tip. Or gift. Which is the gift of kindness.

So this is like taking this opportunity during this time of year to do random acts of kindness. So if you’re at the crowded mall and a parking spot opens up, let that other person take it. If you’re going to get your coffee every day, buy a coffee for the guy behind you. Go and donate some toys to the less fortunate. There’s lots of different amazing groups that take toys in. things like that. So take this time to give. And you will receive back so much more. Even a smile. Right? To give smiles to people when they are in this kind of crazy time. Because everyone’s stress-o-meter is like super high during this time.

That leads me to tip number one, which is the gift of acceptance. So, we get all our family together. People have different viewpoints, things like that. And we can agree to disagree. And we can agree to set aside things like politics, religion and gossip. And you can rest assured at Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t have Uncle Bob bringing up the US election, right? You have like a total relief that if you just disclose at the beginning, hey here’s the ground rules, we’re not going to talk about politics, religion, or gossip. Then, you can just take a breather and really enjoy giving and receiving love to one another during this holiday time.

So, I wanted to let you know, I’ve got more tips I would love to share for you. I’m offering a free discovery session for the first five people that message me over the next week. It’s a 40 minute discovery session. So if you are interested, please message me. And, I just want to say Happy Thanksgiving to all our US friends and family. And also, just all the best over the holiday season. I hope you can weave some of these tips into your day to day. And just really be present during this most precious time with our family.

Because really, at the end of the day, it’s the moments that matter, not the stuff. Thanks for joining me. Have a great day.

Photo by Markus Spiske