Surviving the Holidays
In American culture, the end of the calendar year is often referred to as “the holiday season.” It's not as if we don’t have holidays at other times of the year, but during the last months, two of the most celebrated holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas—appear on our calendars. In some ways, these two holidays run together, as if Thanksgiving is the gateway to Christmas. The period of time between the two tends to be a frenzy of activity.
The end of Thanksgiving dinner signals the start of preparations for Christmas, beginning with “Black Friday” (what a name!). The ensuing month is often filled with shopping for gifts, re-decorating our homes, holiday concerts for the kids, music we listen to at only this time of year, and baking cookies—just for starters. It can be “the most wonderful time of the year” and, at the same time, an exhausting, chaotic scramble.
We've asked Dale Hawley, one of our Missionary Care consultants to give us some tips on how to navigate the holidays with a peaceful heart. Keep reading!!
Soul Care Practices for the Holidays
While missionaries who come from the States are familiar with the holiday season routines, they often live in places where the traditions they’re accustomed to are not practiced. Thanksgiving is a distinctly American holiday, and in non-Christianized nations, the birth of Jesus is not acknowledged as a time for celebration. Like most Americans, they have been socialized to regard this as an important time of year, but they may not be living in a place where cultural norms support this idea. Thus, celebrating the holiday season tends to be a unique experience for missionaries. I’d like to highlight a couple of ways in which this may be the case and help you find new ways to celebrate.
A season of (dis)connection. Perhaps more than any time of year, Americans emphasize connecting with family and friends during the holiday season. Getting together for lavish dinners, exchanging gifts, and traveling miles to spend time together are common occurrences. Because of long distances, missionaries are typically unable to participate in these festivities. They don’t get to share in the turkey dinner or experience the excitement of gift-giving. If that’s you, the holiday season can be a lonely time, accentuated by “Missing Out Syndrome”—the feeling that friends and family back home are enjoying the season while you are sitting on the sidelines thousands of miles away. Sure, you can connect electronically via Skype or Facetime, but it’s not the same.
On the other hand, some missionaries are grateful for the opportunity to miss out on the drama that inevitably surfaces this time of year. Holidays tend to be times when family members who do not interact much on a daily basis find themselves in the same physical space. In some families, this is a time of joy and celebration, while in others, it creates the conditions for an explosion.
Ironically, the holiday season may also be experienced as a time of separation for mission teams, who often function as friends and family on the field. In a lot of cases, at least one team member returns to the States for a visit at this time of year. For those left behind, this not only means that people who share the same cultural traditions are gone, but it can create additional work, such as watching teammates’ homes, paying bills, or picking up additional ministry responsibilities.
Regardless of your experiences, emotions often come to the forefront during the holiday season. Many are related to joy and celebration. But this is also a time of year when loneliness, grief, depression, and anxiety are intensified. For many of us, these sorts of feelings make us want to crawl into a hole, to disconnect with those who are most precious to us.
Let me urge you to resist that temptation. This is a time to reach out to the safest people in your life. Try initiating a Skype call with someone back home or setting up a few hours to hang out with a teammate without worrying about the responsibilities of your work. The times we want to run from people are most often the times we would be best served to run toward them.
Maintaining rituals. The holiday season is filled with rituals. Many of these are cultural, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving or singing carols on Christmas Eve. But a lot of rituals are idiosyncratic to families. We eat certain foods, celebrate special events, and open gifts in our own unique ways. It is an interesting time of year for young families who find a clash in traditions. Each brings a set of rituals from their family of origin and they have to figure out which ones to keep and which to discard.
One of my favorite examples of this is of the young couple celebrating their first Christmas together. When decorating the Christmas tree, they got into a tiff over whether the tinsel was supposed to be spontaneously thrown at the tree or strategically placed on the branches. For many families, this would have created World War III. For this couple…they found a solution by becoming tinsel-free.
Rituals are important identity markers in families. The rituals we attend to say a lot about what we value and about how we distinguish ourselves from other families. Consider, for example, our religious rituals. Participating in worship assemblies, praying before meals, and reading Scripture together all send important meta-messages about the importance of spiritual life in our families.
The way in which we celebrate holidays as families also says important things about who we are. The uniqueness of our traditions places a stamp that states “This is us.” Not being able to participate in holiday rituals with extended family may seem to threaten this sense of identity. But I would suggest that a family’s identity is always evolving. Over time we develop new rituals and cast aside others in order to support our underlying values.
When our kids were small, one of our unique traditions was taking the bus to downtown Minneapolis to eat gingerbread cookies and view the legendary Christmas display at Dayton’s department store. After a few years, we quit doing that because it didn’t fit us anymore (and Dayton’s also discontinued their display!). But just because we stopped one tradition didn’t mean we stopped traditions altogether. We found other traditions that involved spending time together. Over the years, our identity has shifted as we’ve added new members in the form of spouses and grandchildren, but we still try to find ways to sustain our core values.
Living in a new place offers the opportunity for maintaining old rituals and developing new ones. You can still have Thanksgiving dinner on the fourth Thursday in November, even if nobody else in the neighborhood does. And you can still open presents on December 25th even if the community where you live doesn’t celebrate Christmas. But you can also find new ways to celebrate the holidays! You may even find new holidays to celebrate that are part of the culture where you now live. All of them help identify and solidify who you are as family.
So happy holidays! Enjoy the holiday season to its fullest. May it be a time when the ties that bind your family together are strengthened and, as we often say at this time of year, be a season of peace and goodwill.
Have more questions? Let us help you.
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Grip-Birkman Coach Training | December 9-11 | NRH, TX
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