Articles by Peggy

What’s your "Holiday Story"?

For some, it may be about connecting with friends and family, eating hearty meals and treats, singing songs, or getting in touch with one’s spirituality. For others, it may be laced with groans and moans, trepidation, loneliness, frustration, angst, and bouts of depression and anxiety. Often both “stories” can somehow co-exist.

I used to spend quite a bit of time worrying about the holiday season and what it would hold. With increased obligations, people really are in demand this time of year! With so much more on our plate (literally and figuratively) it’s easy to feel overloaded and disconnected from what the holiday season is supposed to mean. Combine that with mandatory or obligatory time spent with relatives or coworkers that may not normally spend time together, and it can be a recipe for STRESS. All of a sudden our holiday stories are about shopping, traveling, running from place to place, and making small talk. They are frenzied and lack depth and feeling. I call this type of story a "thin story" (lacking depth). When life gets taken over with thin stories, we can start to retreat inside ourselves, which only feels worse. It can become a very vicious cycle.

You can re-write or even pre-write your holiday story as an antidote to a woefully thin holiday story that tries so hard to keep you on edge. The story you create needs DEPTH so that it has better staying power than the old story. The way to create depth is to get in touch with what you give value to in life. Here’s a step by step example of pre-writing (or re-writing, if it has already gotten rough) a holiday story: