A Step-By-Step Guide for Surviving Christmas in a Business Family

Christmas is coming up and we are all in preparation for it. It is the most wonderful time of the year, snow, cookies and presents – just to name a few of the goodies. And overall, it’s the time of year when we get together with our loved ones and celebrate. We wear our fashionably questionable Christmas jumpers and enjoy a great meal and exchange presents. Ok so now we have the generally portrayed picture in our head. We all know how it should be and how we would like it to be. Well lets have a look at reality!

Suicide rates spike after Christmas, which is believed to be due of the “broken promise effect”, where we are disappointed with the festive season and the new year is coming up. Often, we do not know what is going on inside of people even in the family. In many cases during Christmas the family forces each other to come together and spend time with each other. We swallow down any disputes and we decide to bear with it. It is each and everyone’s responsibility to make sure the family can have a nice festive season. Is it really? Families are complex systems, and everyone plays a part in how stable the system is. So, the more instability on a personal level the more instability you will find in the family. Hiding the individual instability will only make Christmas seem like one big farce. So, it is paramount to prepare for the festive season, not only for yourself but really for your loved ones. This all poses the question: What can we do to improve Christmas?

Well to start off with, it depends on the dysfunction in the family and the family structure. How large is the Christmas celebration etc. There is no magic one-size-fits-all solution. In some cases, it is best, to not meet and enjoy Christmas with friends or the small sub-family (if you have a partner and/or children). But let’s just assume it is not so bad that we need to go for this option. (And no, the solution is not to drink a bottle of whiskey every day to somehow manage. This is not saying that you should not enjoy good whiskey during Christmas. It is just not the solution to the problem.)

The first step is to not expect too much of Christmas. We often have the picture that I described in the first paragraph in our head and when Christmas does not turn out as we imagined, we are disappointed. I have been in this trap multiple times and still am every year. Accept that it is not as you want it to be and work with what you have. Set yourself some small attainable goals - yes, we should use SMART goals even for Christmas. Once we have set those goals, we can add a little bit of gratefulness to it. Try to be grateful for the small things, focus on what you are looking forward to. Maybe it’s the cousin you like but only see once a year at the Christmas celebration. Or maybe your mother (or mother’s cook) has baked cookies that you love and are not capable of baking yourself. Whatever it is take time and write these things down and make sure you combine these things with your goals. Do not set yourself goals that you in reality despise. It is perfectly fine to for example set the goal that this year you want to eat more of these cookies, rather than hold back and be disappointed that you did not enjoy them. Or maybe the goal is to try and sit next to the cousin at dinner to maximize the time you spend together. I would like to stress that you need to make sure you only set goals which are within your control. We can only control our choices and nothing more. So, make sure the goals are dependable solely on you, or that if they depend on someone else you are positive that you have enough influence over them that you are confident you can get them to agree.

Now that we are hoping for the best and setting ourselves some goals to actively achieve the “best”, it is time to prepare for the worst. You will have a lot of experience about Christmas from years past, use this for negative visualization. Imagine all the things that might go wrong and have gone wrong. In addition to just remembering or imagining these painful events, think of solutions. What can I do if this and that happens? Maybe it’s the moment you go outside for some fresh air. Or you can change the topic by dispersing the presents. If you are especially anxious about your present not hitting the sweet spot, just imagine it happening and how you respond. By preparing yourself in your mind, with a solution orientated approach you should be able to reduce the anxiety within you ahead of Christmas. As mentioned earlier a family is a complex system and you are one part of it. By reducing the instability in yourself you actually help to increase the stability for the whole family system.

Christmas is a great time to practice setting your boundaries and protecting them. In many families we have been educated to become people pleasers. While we are so busy trying to please everyone else we neglect our own needs and become miserable. At Christmas we are especially vulnerable to this effect. The family gathers - parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins - and we will look to our “trusted” family members and try to get “it right”. However, make sure you set your boundaries beforehand for yourself. Try to think of ways your fellow family members tend to overstep your boundaries and prepare beforehand on how to handle the situation. Your boundaries are yours and only yours to decide. Only you need to be comfortable with them, no one else.

As you might have noticed I put the word trust in exclamation marks and this for a good reason. We tend to have trust in family members and sadly the trust is often unjustified. We tend to forget how our trust was misused in the past and still continue to trust. Make sure to realise, which family members you can really trust and how far you can trust others. Otherwise, we run the risk of talking about things at Christmas that we will regret telling certain members afterwards. Sometimes it is even the simple small things. You trust that the Christmas host has prepared everything accordingly, but when you get there, it is in complete chaos. Maybe you trust in people not to bring up topics that will lead to disputes and outrage. Again, remember how people usually behave at Christmas and how things usually run. This way you can draw up some rules of engagement for yourself, to protect yourself from any psychological harm.

Depending on the dysfunction in your family, you can decide to tackle the root cause for a stressful Christmas and openly address the problems. Maybe it is two people who always end up having arguments at Christmas. Call it out beforehand and talk to each of them privately and make them aware that their arguments ruin Christmas for you and potentially everyone else. Try to help them to find a way about it. Maybe one of them doesn’t want to be there anyway, or maybe the solution is that one comes after dinner. Whatever it is, you can decide to try and talk to them. Of course, the root causes are a universe of themselves, and it is hard to even know them or realize. But if you never go on a quest to find these and if you never openly address them, they will continue to cause havoc. This however I recommend being a case of study before Christmas and in preparation to the event. Don’t try to go to root causes at Christmas, unless you want to try and make it a short one and one with a bang on top. I did hear that food fights at Christmas may be healing for the soul…

I hope this article might help you in preparation of the festive days. Enjoy the celebrations, eat plenty, sing loudly and try to just have fun!