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archereation · 6 years

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5 Ways to Create a Holiday You’re Ecstatic With Minus Money

Photo Credit: Uncommon Goods

Holiday.

We all know the term. What does it mean? How do you create a “holiday” from a regular day?

Sure, some of us have time off from work, some of us are automatically going to be around friends and family and celebrate or have a party. What makes a holiday different from a regular day though? What makes any day more special than another? This is the question I am seeking to answer on this day after Christmas, as we reach towards 2019 with hopeful hands.

Not only this, but what makes our frustrations and even anger with our loved ones especially intense on these days that are fed to us through society and the media as the happiest times of the year? Does the pure expectation clashing with reality create this discomfort and stress?

To me, the whole difference between holiday and a regular day is a break from the norm. It has certain special elements that make it unique:

When we eat, it’s food that is special in the way that we don’t normally get to enjoy it. Even the way we eat is different. In most cases, we allow ourselves to indulge more than we would on say, a Monday in April.

People also create a holiday. We make sure we are around people we love. In a lot of cases, people that we don’t normally get to see- therefore, it’s a break from the mundane in this way. Either you make sure you are around people you love the most or people you rarely see or both.

The activities make the holiday. Themed, seasonal, and different than what you do everyday. Do they need to be planned? Extra special to make it worth it? Let’s see...

The setting is the final element that matters. Are you cuddled around a fire? Out on a snowy mountain? A friend’s house? “The condo” or the “cabin”? The home that you miss so much? The setting is key to holiday happiness, or is it?

So, I have settled on these simple ideas, for the sake of understanding, that a holiday is a holiday because it is different than an ordinary, average day.

Now onto the darker, not so obvious aspects of a holiday.

If you have ever been sad or even depressed around the holidays, you know that it can be exacerbated hugely by these “merry” days. My conclusion about why has to do with the expectations that are slathered on thicker than your average day around the holidays. It’s the most wonderful time of the year damn it! Be happy! This notion can make an already down person slide into a spiral.

You don’t necessarily have to be depressed; the feeling doesn’t need to be quite that intense or critical. You could just have the most common human feeling there is: dissatisfaction. You could feel like your life is especially mundane lately, and the expectations of the holiday are making it worse.

Of course, money troubles never help the holidays. When you can’t afford gifts and everything else that our society tells us we must need to make the holiday special, you can feel like your holiday is doomed. There is a pressure, especially when you are showing up at a gathering where you have family and friends that you don’t see all the time, to look a certain way. You feel like you need to sport a new outfit, be fitter than last time you saw them (slim for women, and big and buff for men), and fit into societal “norms.” Maybe you should take the nice car and not the junker because otherwise Uncle Skip may judge you. Should I talk a certain way? you ask yourself. And the list of worries and expectations goes on.

So here is the key question: how do we overcome societal expectations and norms that ultimately make us feel dissatisfied? How do we create a holiday that is special to us personally and therefore satisfying? What elements do we need?

This Christmas, I had a fantastic time. Here is the kicker though: I had no extra money to spend on anything. I couldn’t even afford homemade gifts or a tree. So how, you ask, did I possibly have a great Christmas?

The only gift I received was a bead bracelet purchased for me with 5-25 cent pieces from a man on the street who was trying to get donations to help his Buddhist organization build a temple. I was ecstatic with it. Gut busting laughter filled the rest of the day. But how was I, with nothing, so happy? That is what I am trying to analyze here as we lead into New Years to make sure that this next holiday, and therefore the start of 2019 is just as great.

Here is my guide to a holiday that is satisfying and fun with literally zero expenses (other than $1.25 to buy that beaded bracelet, some gas station and 7-11 sustenance from this same resource along with some much needed and very appreciated gas money from another loved one less):

This holiday guide to satisfaction takes a lot of elements I have learned through research and experience about feeling content in general: this is just a microcosm example of the macrocosm of life. Holidays are like the concentrated elixir of all the elements that make daily life satisfying or dissatisfying. That’s why our dissatisfaction can be so exacerbated during this time: it’s concentrated! Like a shot of whiskey versus a sip of wine or beer, the effects are greater. So here is my humble opinion about what I have learned especially through this last Christmas. Hope they can help you in either these concentrated moments or the larger ones that make up life in general.

1. DON’T COMPARE to past holidays or holidays of others:

Our original plan was to go to my family’s house in the mountains where everyone would be gathering. I was so excited to see the kiddos in my family’s faces light up with the promise of Santa and be around a Christmas time essential: snow! However, in my haste to leave something happened that would surely ruin most people’s holidays: my car almost broke down a quarter of the way through our four hour drive into the Colorado Mountains, and

we had to turn around. That means going back down the mountain we were climbing, back to a non-plan of a Christmas. My internal planner panicked.

I’m not going to lie to you, I was not an image of happiness, enlightenment and calm when this happened. I cried, I got frustrated and used blame on everything up to and including my own haste to leave which was ultimately the culprit of disaster. Originally I thought about sulking and accepting that Christmas was ruined. However, it made me come to this conclusion instead:

Don’t have a perfect image in your mind of what your holiday should be. Become more mindful and I guess you would say Buddhist-like or Christ-like and enlightened in decision and in thought. You want to be like a river: flowing over rocks and obstacles with the natural flow of how things are, not how you “think” they should be.

In our circle on this Christmas, there was a death in a family that we knew of. The mother of the family, the matriarch, had passed away. After the Subaru “Vessel” that has taken me around the country several times, that I lovingly call “The Turtle,” decided to flop out of Christmas and take a time out from the holidays to do turtle things, we took a different path.

We decided to take the Jeep to visit this family that had just adopted three children before this untimely death. We were able to express our sorrow for their loss to them in person. We flowed into this option instead of being secluded in the mountains. We chose to extend into our surrounding community and give our condolences in person. We wouldn’t have been able to do this had an unexpected seemingly tragic thing, (my turtle sleeping), had not happened.

2. Take time to be mindful in your interactions:

If a holiday was ideal and back to its core values, we would take a holiday as a time to make sure we were treating these people we choose to be around in a special way. Not just through gifts, but through words and actions, taking a time to check ourselves and say, I appreciate these people hugely in my life. Let’s show them!

You will get appreciation in return. It will also make the day feel special if you are actively trying to be nicer and make others happy.

3. Do what you need to do to let go and relax without substances.

This does NOT mean I am saying, “you must stay sober this holiday season in order to be happy.” No, not what I mean at all. I am saying find out in your core what relaxes you and lets you go freely into the day without substances first, and then do what you won’t regret.

This part is ESSENTIAL for my personal happiness. This doesn’t mean I am necessarily an “addict” in “recovery”. I don’t need the label and don’t think I am one. However, we both know that we had the option to indulge in substances this holiday and struggled with that. We could have drank, or whatever else, and felt relaxed and good MOMENTARILY, but it would have been fleeting.

It came up while driving around where we had a fleeting “holiday idea” to stop by a liquor store or dispensary (after all, we live in Colorado) where we knew vices would be galore. We considered it and almost did. We made our final, always easy on other than “holiday” decision by asking ourselves this simple question which I think would help anyone, struggler or not, with whether or not to bend their mind this holiday season: Will we regret it more than we would regret NOT doing it?

Our conclusion, led by my partner, was that we would regret going more than not going, so although the tug of war was a struggle momentarily, we ultimately were happy with our decision and had a laughter filled night even though it was also a very satisfying and sober night.

4. Appreciate what you have, and in this way become an open antenna for positive energy input and output.

This can mean the setting you live in, which costs nothing. I am spoiled in this aspect because I live in Colorado. It’s easy to have free happiness when you live at the base of the Continental Divide with 300 days of sunshine or more a year, I know. Yes, I’m bragging.

This appreciation truly can be practiced anywhere though. Find beauty in life and source your happiness from it. (Thanks, Oriah). Concrete can be beautiful. For example, this Christmas, we later decided to walk around downtown Denver, and without being planned, the setting was perfect. It was cloudy and close to dusk, so the sunset was colorful. There wasn’t an abundance of people crowding the streets, just a few people having fun. The lights were beautiful. Overall, I felt awesome, and the setting played a big part in that feeling. I felt the happiness of those around me because I was open to appreciation. And this is now something I would like to carry with me daily.

5. Do something you have been wanting to do that you put off on a normal day. Treat yourself essentially, except it doesn’t have to be with money:

To me, this meant simply wearing a dress that I never have the opportunity to wear in my normal daily life, where I do a lot of moving and work such as when performing the rigors of construction and remodeling.

The pink and white lace detail made me feel pretty and gave me a chance to try a new hairstyle too. This cost zero money. I already had the dress and had even worn it to a celebration before, but with zero cost to me, I styled it differently and therefore I felt awesome.

My example doesn’t mean you have to look or dress a certain way. Some other examples of treating yourself with no cost are below:

Visit a new local place you never go, eat something different, take a walk with a friend you don’t normally see, go walk a dog at the animal shelter that you can’t adopt but want to hang out with, etc, etc. It could be anything, and it absolutely does NOT need to cost money or be the normal routine holiday that you have become and allowed yourself to be accustomed to. There’s a great saying that my partner recently added to this arsenal of quality-of-life knowledge, and that is: “Change your thinking, Change your life.”

So there are my thoughts, ideas, and realizations about why my holiday was so great. I am no guru and am not denying the real depression that can hit all of us during the holidays. If anything, use these techniques to manage your feelings.

I hope I can help with my insights in some ways, and help you to know that the best things in life truly are free. Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading, and let me know how do you have a content and satisfying holiday? Please comment with your ideas!

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