Holiday Stress and Why You Don’t Need It, Featuring a Beer Drinking Baby

“Jen, if this needle goes past here, you’re fired.  Does that make you feel stressed at all?  Does it?  Jen? Are you sure?  Jen?  Does it?  Are you sure?  Are you sure?  Are you sure?” – IT Crowd

Playing triangle in a band is something a Jamaican won’t do, mon.  It stresses them out to be responsible for every ting.

There is a love/hate relationship with the Holidays.  By the Holidays, I really mean Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve – and not any of the other 107 holidays in November or 69 holidays in December our crack Wilder research team was able to find with one Google® search.  There are (really) days like National Cookie Day on December 4, International Ninja Day on December 5, and National Salesperson Day on December 13.  National Salesperson Day?  I’m not buying that one.

One reason we love the Holidays is how we looked forward to them when we were kids.  The Holidays meant, at the minimum, time off from school.  In the American Dream Household®, there was time for snowmen, sledding, and mugs of hot chocolate while we sang Christmas carols for our neighbors.  On top of all of that, there was the smell of turkey on Thanksgiving, the tantalizing secrets of the wrapped mysteries under the Christmas tree, and the miracle of pulling Uncle Vern’s finger.

Okay, our neighbors had concertina wire and watch towers, so we couldn’t get within a quarter mile of their houses without the password.  I’m sure we would have belted out a few Christmas carols if they hadn’t fired those warning shots.

I did accomplish one thing last Christmas.  I won the Netflix® marathon.

As I got older, the hate part of the Holidays begins to show up:  stress from bills, stress from dealing with corporate Christmas parties, stress from having to decide which sets of parents get which visits on which days, stress from having to deal with relatives that you’d rather never see again, and stress from hiding the bodies of those relatives you will never see again.

Some people get hit so badly with this stress that they actually panic.  And panic can be a serious mental illness, not carefree and happy go lucky like the ones I have.  But I gave up on being upset at Christmas years ago.

I’ve learned the secret:  I don’t care.

I will say, the FBI looked more competent in Die Hard than they have for the last three years . . . .

Okay, that’s not entirely true, I do care.  But I choose what I care about.  And I choose what I don’t care about.

You see, the old line that “Aging is a matter of mind.  If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter,” slightly modified, applies here as well.  I’ll customize it a bit:  “Holidays:  If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

I think the biggest problem that most people have is high standards.  High standards are a gateway to constant disappointment.  If your life is wrapped around making the holiday perfect, then you’ll stress yourself out by trying to make the holiday perfect.  And then?  When you fail to achieve perfection?  Your stress will increase that much more.  Your stress might then turn from disappointment to depression, which I admire, because that shows real dedication that you don’t seen in those millennial kids nowadays.

As bad as that quest for perfection is, it can be even worse than that – often people want to view perfection not through their own standards, but through the views of other people.  Now, on top of trying to meet your standards, you have to imagine what the standards of other people might be, and try to figure out how to meet those as well.  It’s why Bill Clinton doesn’t do threesomes – if he wanted to disappoint two people at the same time, he could have just taken Hillary out for dinner.

Bill was especially disappointed when Hillary lost because he realized he wouldn’t get a fresh batch of interns.

However, you can make the conscious choice to not choose perfection.  What happens if you don’t care if the turkey isn’t perfect?  What happens if you don’t care if other people are upset?

Well, nothing.

Certainly, there’s something on my list above from bills to parties to relatives that is (or was) on your list.  Me?  Sure, I’ve had a disappointment or two, and yes, I’ve gotten stressed a time or two.  But not recently.

If you’re feeling stressed at the holidays, the Internet will tell you to do lots of things.  The top five tips (really!) on one particular site?

• Take a walk in the sunlight.
• Smell citrus.
• Take yet another walk. (Yes, it was item one, and also item three.)
• Take a supplement.
• Squeeze between your thumb and forefinger.

Yes.  These will all certainly help – help a journalist on a deadline come up with a “unique” take on holiday stress.  I’ll admit, out of the 27 or so tips, there were some good ones.  But when “Take a whiff of citrus” is in your top two ideas for dealing with stress?  That’s almost as bad an idea as when they decided to put an “s” in lisp.

A journalist, an anthropologist, and a philosopher walk into a bar.  The bartender says, “Hey Anderson, still no job?”

Between now and the New Year, we’ll probably not get farther than 90 miles from the house, and that will be to celebrate Penultimate Day (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust).  We’ll spend time with people we like, and not people we have to spend time with.

Might there be some stress?  Sure.  That happens.  But only if I want it to.