Winter is fast approaching and with it comes the holiday season. Some people absolutely love the holiday season and look forward to it all year. Other people may view the holiday season differently due to all of the aspects that can cause stress and a feeling of being overwhelmed. If you’re one of the latter people, you should try these four simple ways to avoid holiday stress.
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Set A Personal Gift Limit
When the holidays arrive, it’s only natural to want to shower your friends and loved ones with every item they’ve mentioned needing or wanting over the past year. Some could argue that the holiday season has become an excuse to indulge in impulse buying. People who find shopping to be a coping mechanism will often overspend during the holidays since it’s the “time of giving” even though they shop themselves into debt.
A great way to counter this mentality is to organize your shopping and manage your funds fervently. One tip for accomplishing this monumental task is to set a gift limit. You can either set an overall gift limit and have to choose which friends and family members won’t receive a gift or you can set a gift limit per each person. This is entirely at your discretion, but once you’ve staved off the shopping frenzy mentality, the holidays will feel much more simple and satisfying.
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Prioritize Your Invitations
During the holiday season, you will find that friends and relatives that you haven’t heard from during the past year are suddenly calling or texting you with invitations to their holiday dinners or parties. It’s understandable that you’ll want to attend every dinner and party to which you’re invited, but don’t do this at the expense of your health and sanity. Family, work, and your own holiday obligations may cause scheduling conflicts between your immediate family and your extended family.
Should this type of conflict arise, it is important to look at your slew of invitations with a realistic mindset. Grab your personal calendar, write out which dinners or parties you can realistically attend, and stick to those decisions. As for the other invitations that you’ve received but won’t be able to accept, there are ways to politely decline an invitation. This will ensure that you won’t be left off of the invitation list next year. Do try to alternate relatives every holiday so no one feels left out.
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Revolutionize Your Holiday
Holiday traditions are strongly guarded and protected in both our society and our family units. The only issue with holiday traditions is that some of them can prove to be time-consuming, frustrating, and stressful. The holiday season is not supposed to evoke these negative and unhealthy experiences. If you find that you’re swamped under a pile of holiday traditions that are holding you to an unbelievably high standard, dare to break free and create your own traditions that suit your schedule and your abilities.
A great example of a stressful tradition is the value that people place on real trees over synthetic ones. Caring for a real tree requires daily vacuuming of the fallen needles, ensuring that the tree is watered to remain green, and a real tree will need to be placed away from heating ducts or any heat sources. Embracing synthetic Christmas trees will eliminate all of those worries from your life, grant you the size and beauty of a real tree, and will continue to serve your family well for many holidays to come.
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Don’t Fall For Holiday Sales
One of the most hectic and stressful aspects of the holiday season are the sales that happen. Every flyer you get in the mail will try to convince you that it’s urgent to rush down to their store for a once-in-a-lifetime sale. Couple these miniature sales with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and you’ve got a recipe for very stressful and complicated days ahead. To avoid falling for these marketing tricks, don’t go to one of these sales unless they’re offering a sale on at least three items that you needed before the sale happened.
To further reduce your holiday stress, consider ordering your holiday meal from a local restaurant or caterer. It can be a little expensive to do so, but you’ll be receiving a lot of extra time and relaxation in return.
