Habits of my holiday season

“Happy Holidays ‘tis the Season and all that.”   Christmas has always been such a mixed bag of blessing and baggage for me. And I must say that I have had to spend a concentrated effort over the past 3 years to make some meaningful and significant changes.  For far too many years I let myself be pushed and pulled and put out at the mercy of rituals and patterns that I never stopped to question.  Then I wondered why I was so unhappy during what is supposed to be the “most wonderful time of year.” 

I could go on for days about the revelations I had once I started to uncover the unhealthy habits of my holiday season.  There were many traumatic events that surfaced and became an opportunity for healing. After going through my divorce and empty nest I made some important changes in how and where I celebrated concentrating more on the season itself rather than just the day.  But I think one of the most important revelations came in the area of “giving and receiving” and one I stumbled on quite unexpectedly.

The whole area of gift giving and receiving was fraught with drama, trauma and stress for me and in evaluating my self, my friends and my culture I have come to believe that most of us are terribly wounded in this area.

Gift giving is almost invariably tied to money and stretching my already tight budget was always an issue.  Like everyone, my list was long and expectations high for finding “the perfect” gift for everyone on it.  Add to that my need to have the perfect wrapping, decorations and holiday parties and it all adds up to one exhausted, depressed and resentful person! Bah-humbug.

So first I had to learn to let go of all my perfectly awful expectations.  For a couple of years I cut my gift list down to one person, my son, and for him I wrote a check.  I stayed out of the malls and shops, stopped fighting the traffic and being led around by the nose by others who simply wanted to empty my pockets.  I minimized my decorating, stopped giving parties and only attended those I really wanted to.  I stopped sending Christmas cards in the hopes that people would drop me from their list, ha-ha. They didn’t but I didn’t let it guilt me. Taking the pressure off the pressure cooker was a huge relief and a step in the right direction to finding meaning in the things I did choose to do.

And then I made the first of several important discoveries about giving.  My therapist (the owner of this website) suggested that before I did anything at all for anyone else I was to go out and buy myself a present for my own inner child.  I was taken aback by the level of excitement that I felt rise up inside me when she made this suggestion.  So I figured this must be something important to try.  Shortly after that I walked into a home improvement store with a friend of mine and one of the first things that caught my attention in the Christmas department was a stunningly beautiful musical carousel.  For some reason this particular gift tickled my fancy and filled in me a need for something whimsical and completely unpractical.

My first lesson was that giving to my self was something that had not only been lacking but had probably been at the root of a lot my resentment.  Now, I buy my self not only Christmas but birthday presents as well.  It is tremendously fulfilling to get exactly what I want in the colors I prefer and in the perfect size, etc.  Depriving ourselves of our deepest desires or expecting someone else to guess what they are is a sure sign we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

My second important discovery on this healing journey was that “it is not more blessed to give than to receive” but rather I was finally able to make the distinction in how giving and receiving are really two sides of the same coin.  To try and have one without the other is completely dysfunctional and sets us up for all kinds of problems. 

After learning the importance of giving to myself I was finally able to understand how this works.  Last year one of the gals in my book club asked several of us to lunch just before Thanksgiving and asked for our help in decorating her tree and house for Thanksgiving as she was completely stressed out and overwhelmed.  It was a completely fun afternoon of food and drink conversation and decorating.  What would normally have taken a week took an afternoon. She was thrilled with the result and before the season was over our little “team” had decorated 6 homes for women in various stages of loss, depression or overwhelm.  Buy the time we were finished I was ready to knock on the door of complete strangers and offer to decorate their homes for them.  Me, who a couple of years before had been in my own state of holiday despair, had a complete transformation. 

It dawned on me what a gift I was giving to these women and at the same time the fun and satisfaction I was receiving completely transformed my holiday.

For the first time in all my years I understood how giving and receiving are the same thing.  And how important it was for me to evaluate the flow of giving and receiving in my life.

To be a generous giver is only half of the picture we must open our selves to the receiving in order to complete the cycle and reap the benefits.  I have observed that in relationships of all kinds one or the other area is blocked and giving and receiving become a power struggle rather than a flow of energy.

To give anything out of guilt or obligation or to give putting expectations on the receiver is not to give but to extort some sort of behavior from another or to hold someone else hostage in our attempt to get our own needs met.  To refuse the gift out of pride or independence or to place expectations on the giver is also a means of extortion to get our needs met from the other side.

To relax our hearts and our minds, to let go of our expectations and our neediness is essential in order to create the flow of energy and love in our lives. To discover what our needs are and learn to give those to ourselves is a first step in the process.  It eliminates our neediness and greediness and the need to extort from others what they might not be able to give.

This has become for me the truest meaning of the “reason for the Season”.  For me, Christmas is a reminder of these principles, a time to fully engage the flow of consciously giving and receiving. I have taken the pressure is off.  The energy ebbs and flows as I do only those things that resonate with me. As I give first to my self and meet my own deepest needs and desires I am free to enjoy the even more enriching experience of giving and receiving as it was meant to be enjoyed.

“When the receiver is ready the giver appears” is something I hope everyone has an opportunity to discover this holiday season!