The Messaging I’ve Refused to Buy Into This Holiday Season

It’s the end of December, the winding down of a busy month for therapists and families alike. While we process the events of 2025, including the high points, the grief, and the compulsion to check those last few boxes on the to-do list, I want to propose something a little different. I offer you the following challenge: What will you NOT be doing over the next few weeks? In the hopes that you will think about the boundaries you can set in your own life to make this time of year more rest and relaxation and less burnout and overstimulation, I’ll share with you the few goals I’ve come up with to help me remember not to buy into the hype of the holidays at the expense of caring for myself.

1. I have not and will not be putting an ‘Elf on the Shelf’.

I get it. It’s a chance to be creative, and the pictures, I’ll admit, are cute. It’s also a lot of marketing and unpaid labor that falls exclusively on women (if there are men who are putting the Elf on the Shelf, I want to hear from you — I’ll wait). Women continue to do much of society’s unpaid labor as well as reap the mental health consequences that can follow shouldering the burden of care work (Ervin, et al., 2022). I see the Elf on the Shelf as symbolic of the multiple societal pressures given to women around the holidays that I refuse to carry. How have I been dealing with this with my kid? A wise friend of mine, also resisting this additional piece of labor, gave me a great idea: ‘Every family has different traditions and this one isn’t part of ours.’ Feel free to steal that!

2. I will be paying better attention to my own bodily cues, including hunger, fatigue, and general feelings of physical and mental overwhelm, not accepting that feeling completely wrung out, especially as a mother and wife, is a given this time of year.

If you grew up parentified, an experience I write about frequently, especially with regard to how it impacts adult relationships, this point is extremely important. If you carried the emotional, physical and/or financial health of your parents or family members as a child, then you likely don’t pay close attention to what you need as an adult. This includes not only your emotional health but also your physical health. If you have put off that dentist appointment, skipped your physical, or dismissed those GI symptoms, consider this an opportunity to tune in and take care.

3. I will be silencing the food police and not shaming myself into the next dieting fad that the new year will bring.

Nothing irks me more in the new year than the targeted marketing to ‘get in shape’ or make the coming year about a ‘new you’. Couched in the language of healthy living, this seems to indicate that 1) the ‘current’ you needs fixing and 2) that dieting and weight loss will fix it. The kind of dieting rhetoric that focuses on losing weight, increasing energy levels (so you can continue to care for others), and fitting into specific outfits to ‘impress’ tends to target women, as do moralistic terms like eating a ‘clean’ diet (Bouvier & Chen, 2021). There is nothing wrong with wanting to make lifestyle changes because you want to make them. Feeling shamed into doing so through coercive marketing is different.

4. I will be focusing not on what I am doing, but how I am feeling, ignoring the general expectation that the holidays must be about constant production instead of a chance to reset the internal compass.

In her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, author and founder of the Nap Ministry Tricia Hersey offers us a framework for understanding our exhaustion, namely, that the constant need for production is an extension of a capitalist society that does not benefit from our rest. She implores us to resist the impulse to wear down, burn out, or otherwise work our bodies into the ground. I try to remember this quote at the opening of the book:

Your body is a site of liberation.

It does not belong to capitalism.

Love your body.

Rest your body.

Move your body.

Hold your body.

Whether you try one or all these things or come up with goals of your own, remember this isn’t about perfect adherence. It’s about setting an intention with yourself and doing your best to meet it. Giving yourself the permission to take care of yourself first and let that care be what guides you this holiday season and into the new year is the best and most long-lasting gift you will ever get.