Cathy and Mark Madavan share how to create the Christmas you both want.
It’s that wonderful time of year again!
Bring on the soft-focus adverts, the wide-eyed children, the candle-lit carol services. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and all that jazz. Or is it? In our experience, it’s often the season of being jolly tired and tetchy with those closest to you.
To be clear, though, we do love Christmas. What’s not to love about a holiday where you get to lounge about watching TV while eating too much cake without any guilt? But many couples find Christmas a particularly challenging time of year. Perhaps the sugary ads make us feel inadequate or even more imperfect than normal. Or maybe deeper tensions surface as the season unfolds. Certainly the financial and practical pressures from family and each other can add more and more strain.
Before our children came along, our entire Christmas was often spent zooming around the country visiting relatives, resulting in very little peace and a distinct lack of goodwill by the end of it all. Over the years our circumstances changed, but we still struggled through a pile of each other’s assumptions and family members’ expectations trying to work out what was right for us in our marriage.
Here's what we really wish we'd thought about earlier in our relationship when it came to celebrating Christmas:
What does Christmas mean to us as a couple?
Discuss each other’s expectations surrounding Christmas and consider what is right for you this year. What are your priorities? Make space to do those things. You can always add in extra festivities if you feel you have the time and energy.
What are our established Christmas traditions?
One of us had always opened presents in the morning, one of us after lunch. And it turned out these traditions were pretty important to us! What would you like to keep doing this year? What would you like to start doing?
Where are we both able to compromise?
For example, the battle of when you will put up the Christmas tree; at the beginning of December in order to maximise the effort or near Christmas Eve to maximise the excitement? And should it be a real tree or not?
Setting a budget together.
One of us is more ‘Santa’ with a list of gifts and cards to buy for almost everybody they have ever known, and the other is more ‘Scrooge’ with a spreadsheet and a hunch that much of Christmas is rather a waste of resources. It is like a giant organisational and budgeting project which has to be squeezed around our already far too busy lives. Honour each other by discussing the key areas you’re both willing to spend time and money on over Christmas.
Friction and frustration have often accompanied the tinsel and the turkey in our house. But when we honestly face, discuss and challenge some of those issues together (and learn to compromise!) we can create a truly special time of year with our own traditions and our own priorities. Of course, our plans might adapt as our family changes, house moves happen, and perhaps children come, go or have children of their own, but establishing family rituals like carol singing, opening stockings on the bed, or going for a bracing Boxing Day walk are one of life’s joys.
Christmas is a special time of faith, hope and love – as well as mince pies, films and hunting for batteries – and if we can work out together what matters to us, be thankful for what we do have and let go of what we don’t, then despite the inevitable festive frustrations, we can enjoy creating some wonderful moments in our marriage which we will remember for a lifetime.
About the author
Cathy is a popular speaker and author of several books. She is mum to two grown up daughters and would describe motherhood as heart-breaking, fun, exhausting and wonderful – sometimes all in the same day! She lives in Bristol with her husband Mark.
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