Is Christmas a unilaterally happy time for you or is it stressful?

Happy: 20%. Stressful: 80%.

Reason: Christmas always seems to coincide with exam time. I rarely enjoy Christmas fully with the exam in my hand. This year exam ends sooner than Christmas, but school starts right after the exam. So I spend my Christmas with textbooks again.

The only time it’s stressful for me is if we need to buy gifts. The only time we buy gifts is if we go to my husband’s parents for Christmas. I guess if we went to someone else’s house we would buy gifts for them too, but we don’t usually spend Christmas with someone else. It’s either with his family or just us. Sometimes we visit friends Christmas Day, but I don’t feel
obligated to buy a gift, except maybe a token show up with something. If they have young children I would more likely just bring gifts for the children.

Sometimes helping my MIL cook or clean up afterwards is a pain in the neck. She makes too much. I know how easy it is to wind up making too much food, so I’m not angry about it, but it’s not relaxing. And, she fights me on helping to clean up, which is annoying. It takes hours to clean everything.

This year my husband is coming home Christmas Eve, it will be just us two, and I am making our favorite Christmas dish out of all the typical ones his mom makes. No gifts, no stress.

I’m hoping to maybe visit some friends Christmas Day to get a dose of child excitement about new toys from Santa.

I’m pretty neutral I guess. I didn’t grow up with Christmas. My husband always feels it’s anticlimactic. I think he compares it to the excitement and magic of childhood Christmas.

Christmas has been equivalent to stress for as long as I can remember. When I was in college, it always coincided with exams and final essays due, and school ended around 12/18 or so, so it was never an enjoyable December. By the time school ended, there were just days to get Christmas stuff done.

Now that I work full time, and have a child, it’s even more hectic and stressful. There are two major holiday parties the first two weekends of December and one is pretty much mandatory and one is optional. Both parties have over 500 guests and I get to stay at the hotel where the parties are, which is nice but it also fucks up the whole weekend. So two weekends in December have limited free time. This past weekend (the weekend we just finished as this is now Sunday night), my daughter had a birthday party Saturday morning, a Christmas party in the community I live in (it’s not called a “holiday party” it’s definitely a Christmas party) Saturday night, and this morning, Sunday, she had another birthday party, and this afternoon and evening we visited friends for dinner and hanging out.

Very hectic. So hectic that today, when backing out of my driveway this morning, frazzled and stressed, I didn’t see my neighbor walking behind my car with his dog and I almost ran him over. I heard “whoa whoa whoa!” and heard a noise. I pulled back into the driveway and saw him walking away. I am not sure exactly what happened because he was so upset he just put his hand up as he was walking away and I called apologies after him. I was not happy about the whole thing and am not sure what to do. I am considering asking a q on Fluther about it. Meantime, I decided that next year I am going to cut down on the parties and events (the other optional party at work I think I will pass on, even though I enjoy it). In my free time I have been trying to shop, and I can shop like a marathon runner, till 10 o’clock at night. Between the shopping, the parties, and work, it’s totally stressful. All the moms who work full time seem to be in the same boat. We were talking at the party yesterday about how every year Christmas comes so fast and we’re never ready.

I feel like the Christmas that is portrayed in magazines consists of beautifully wrapped presents, wonderful baking sessions with children, and writing out cards by the fireplace while sipping cocoa. Please. That has never happened in my adult life. Today, the birthday present for the first party was wrapped on the bed right before leaving the house, and the Christmas presents for the friends we visited were wrapped in the car with borrowed tape from the host.

Christmas coincides with the end of a teaching period for me. So I’m buried under a pile of marking and admin work, but now I also need to ready my house for Christmas, shop for presents, wrap said presents and cook food etc. etc. So at the moment it feels like 90% stress. I love Christmas, but this year is not feeling too joyful yet.

Christmas isn’t a happy time for me. It’s not particularly stressful, either, as I only have a few dysfunctional family members.

I want to add I do live going to see The Nutcracker when I get to. Also, when I started working in retail as a teen during the holidays I liked all Merry Christmas attitude, songs, decorations, I understood it all better. Once I was older and working full time in retail the exhaustion felt abusive.

@jca Anyone who walks behind a car assuming, expecting, or hoping the driver sees them is an idiot.

I think I’ve been in a play every Christmas season for the last 5 years, which means I don’t even start shopping until about five or ten days beforehand. And I suck at shopping. It’s stressful.

The holiday season used to start with Thanksgiving Day and continue through New Year’s Day, for most of my life. It was all fun, perhaps a few exhausted moments, yet those I people whom I loved were around or visiting. Anniversaries, birthdays, travel, giving, receiving, and sometimes just sitting and looking at enjoying the goings on, were all full of fun. The decorations went up, food was made, dinning room post-meal familial chats and reminiscing, later taking moments out to check on their kids, then resuming until late, were the happiest of times. I always got a huge kick out of finding ‘The’ gift that I knew would be perfect for this person and such. The years when a sibling couldn’t find a child’s Santa Present sent a couple of State’s worth of family to immediately go out on a ‘blanket the city’-search. We spent more time laughing about it than getting stressed. It all began to change in later years as situations changed and has now ended. Some years it is tough, but I end up laughing when recalling the best of the best. Then when I realized that we were so freaking lucky to have had things that were so wonderful. That many don’t, or haven’t. So I accept this period of quiet solitude with as much grace as I can muster. Things could be worse. Perhaps at some point I will put some decorations or such, but at this point, I don’t think so.
So stressed out for the holidays? Revel in it. Soak it up. Enjoy it all to the core of your being. You may need to rely on such memories some day also.

When I stopped worrying about shopping, my Christmases became much easier. I make stuff, I cook a non-traditional dinner for friends and waifs and my kids, I eat too much and just hang out. I am extraordinarily selfish in that I refuse to buy into the obligation part any more.
The stress for me is the gnat cloud of criticism from so many about how it is handled in the world.
People complain that there’s a war on Christmas.
People complain about the people complaining about a war on Christmas.
People complain that the decorations go up too early.
People complain that the season has become to commercial.
People complain that they don’t like certain kinds of decorations.
Etc
Etc
Etc

Literally NONE of those things need to impact anyone’s holiday (whether it’s Christmas, Channukah, Kwanzaa, the Solstice or anything else) AT ALL.

I enjoy that there is a colorful fuss during these cold dark days in the north.

The first one.

@ucme Why?

Because we never let christmas get in the way of itself, it is what it is & we enjoy to the max as a family without any concerns or distractions over timetables/budget etc.
Live the moments fully & appreciate them for what they are, here endeth the lesson.

Well I enjoy the festivities but I’m not wild about the gift giving. I like to be able to buy things for people whenever I want too. Christmas has become mandatory gift giving, instead of giving from the heart.
I wouldn’t say stressful, but certainly annoying.

Maybe you could give “Gift Certificates”, @Pandora.
“This certificate promises you a special gift within the next 12 months!”
Keep a list of people you gave certificates to, and cross them off as you gift them. When you find ‘that gift’ you could remind them that it’s their Christmas present by asking, “Care to redeem that gift certificate I gave you last Christmas?”

You know what? This is an amazing idea I just came up with! If I knew how to copyright it, I wouldn’t even post. I wish I’d thought of it 30 years ago!

“Pre-Gift” should be the next big wave.