How to Simplify the Holidays (What We’re Actually Cutting This Year)

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Last year I made a list of everything we were supposed to do between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. I wrote it out on the back of an envelope at the kitchen table, and when I got to the end of it I counted twenty-six things. Twenty-six. Lochlan was ten months old. I had been awake since four.

That envelope is why I started thinking seriously about how to simplify the holidays, and not in the way the magazines mean it. I did not want a prettier December. I wanted a December I could actually be present for.

Write the whole list down first

This sounds backwards. If the goal is less, why start by making the list longer?

Because most of the holiday load is invisible until you see it in one place. The cards. The teacher gifts. The cookie exchange you said yes to in October. The drive to Danny’s parents and the drive back. The advent calendar you have to remember to fill every single night. None of those feel like much on their own. All of them together is why you are crying in the car in the Target parking lot on December 14th.

So I write it all down. Every obligation, every tradition, every errand. Then I go through and I ask one question about each line: who is this actually for?

Some of it is for Lochlan, and it stays. Some of it is for Danny or for me, and it stays. And a surprising amount of it is for nobody. It is for a version of the holidays I absorbed somewhere and never questioned.

What we are cutting this year

Cards. We have sent a photo card every year since we moved to Long Grove, and every year it costs me two evenings and about ninety dollars, and I do not think a single person has kept one. If you love sending cards, send cards. I am done.

The second tree. We had a small one in the living room and a bigger one in the front room, and the small one existed entirely so the front room tree could stay nice. This year Lochlan is twenty months old and there is going to be one tree and he is going to put every ornament on the bottom third of it.

Baking for other people. I bake constantly, and I love it, but somewhere along the way December baking turned into a production line. Tins for neighbors, tins for Danny’s office, tins for the mail carrier. This year I am baking what we want to eat in our own house and that is the whole list.

Most of the elf. I am not going to pretend I have strong feelings about the elf one way or the other. I just know I am not moving a small plastic man around my kitchen at eleven at night in the middle of a flare. I have an autoimmune disease, and the nights I lose to a scheme like that cost me real days afterward. That math has never once worked out in my favor.

Gifts got simpler, and so did the wrapping

We do four gifts for Lochlan. Something he wants, something he needs, something to wear, something to read. It is not an original idea and I did not invent it, but it ended the thing where I kept adding one more small item to the cart because the pile looked thin.

The pile ALWAYS looks thin in November and enormous on Christmas morning. Every year. I have stopped trusting my November eyes.

For everyone else, I have mostly moved to things we make. I start homemade vanilla extract in September so it is ready by December, and it has turned into the gift people actually ask me for. Jars of apple butter. A loaf of something, still warm, handed over at the door.

The wrapping is one roll of plain kraft paper and a ball of twine. That is it. I buy the paper once, it lasts two years, and I never stand in a store in December trying to decide between eleven patterns I will throw away in four days.

One thing a week, not five

Here is the change that made the biggest difference, and it is almost embarrassingly simple. We do one holiday thing per week. One.

The tree farm is a week. The lights downtown is a week. Baking the cutout cookies is a week. Spread across five or six weeks, that is still five or six genuinely lovely days, and none of them land on top of each other.

What we used to do was stack three things into one Saturday because it was the Saturday we were free, and then wonder why everyone was crying by four in the afternoon. (Everyone being, on at least one occasion, me.)

A toddler can hold about one outing. Past that you are not making a memory, you are managing a meltdown in a parking lot. The same is true of adults, honestly, we are just quieter about it.

Cook less, and cook it earlier

I pull December meals out of the freezer. Not the holiday meal itself, that one I still make properly, but the ordinary Tuesdays in between. In November I double whatever I am already making and the extra goes in the freezer, so December dinners are mostly a matter of remembering to thaw something.

It is the same approach I use on low-energy weeks the rest of the year. Past-me cooks for present-me. Present-me is grateful and slightly annoyed that past-me did not make more.

For the actual holiday meal, I cut the side dishes down to the ones people eat. We had a green bean dish that appeared every year for a decade and I finally admitted out loud that nobody at this table likes it. Nobody argued. It had been going in the trash every December 26th and we all just kept quietly participating.

Somebody is going to be disappointed

This is the part the simplify-your-holidays lists skip, and it is the part that actually matters.

When you stop doing something, somebody notices. My mother-in-law noticed the cards. A friend noticed when the cookie tin did not arrive. Nobody was cruel about it. But there was a moment, and I had to sit in it, and sitting in it was harder than two evenings of addressing envelopes would have been.

I do not have a trick for that. I just know the alternative is doing all twenty-six things forever because one person might be briefly let down, and I am not willing to spend December that way anymore. This is the same thing I keep learning in every other part of this life. Slow living is not a softer version of doing everything. It is choosing, and choosing costs something.

What I am keeping

Candles in the windows from the first of December. Dewey loses his mind about the tree for roughly three days and then ignores it entirely. Delilah sits in the empty box and will not be moved.

The greenery. I cut branches from our own yard and put them in a basket by the fireplace, and that plus candlelight does more for making the house feel cozy than anything I have ever bought.

Slow mornings. We do not change our morning routine in December, which is maybe the single most protective thing on this list. The coffee, the slow start, Lochlan on the kitchen floor pulling the pots out of the bottom cabinet. December does not get to touch that hour.

And the toy rotation, which matters more in December than any other month, because otherwise the new things land on top of everything already out and the whole house goes sideways for three weeks.

If you are new here and wondering what slow living actually means to me, this is a decent example of it. Not candles and a nice sweater. A list on the back of an envelope and the willingness to cross things off.

I will be at the kitchen table sometime in the next week with this year’s version. The envelope is shorter already.