Holiday Planning: Take Back Your Time, Money and Energy

I just got back from delivering a workshop titled "Holiday Planning: Take Back Your Time, Money and Energy" for one of the Chicago Suburban Villages. What a great time we had: police officers, firemen, maintenance crew, HR personnel, other city officials...all complaining about the same thing for the holiday season. We all want to curb our spending, feel like we have a choice about where we spend our time over the holidays, and reduce the pressure to put on a "perfect holiday"!

I was so moved by the participants' work to identify the components of their "Old Model Holidays" and create a vision for a "New Model Holiday". Some funny descriptions of the "Old Model" are: being cranky and resentful as we shop, being rude to other drivers looking for parking spaces in the mall, rolling our eyes at the holiday music, eating tons of sugar becuase it "doesn't count" during December and we can always lose the weight during January, eating more than one lunch and dinner in order to visit ALL the relatives in the family, spending equal amounts of money on each gift, feeling an urgency to decorate the house, and wearing ugly sweatshirts with reindeer because it's symbolic of the holiday.

Examples of the new model are: Decorating our homes from the desire to create warmth and beauty, holding each person dearly in mind when shopping and creating a budget to keep from overspending, creating new traditions that fit in with current lifestyle choices, letting go of "perfection" and enjoying being with people wherever we're at, having activity plans but being flexible to change, letting ourselves have whatever true feelings we're having and forgot about keeping a "happy" face, creating real intimacy and connection with family, friends and strangers.

We then identified and totalled up the "soft addictions" (www.softaddictions.com) that keep us from reaching our vision. One woman noticed that she frantically drank Starbucks' Holiday Edition Peppermint Mochas during the season and totalled up the cost to find that she could have an extra $131 a month to spend elsewhere! She created a plan to put that money toward some of her bills to help keep her debt down as she goes shopping for loved ones next month.

These beautiful "New Model" visions helped inspire the group to create action plans and steps to add in more nourishment while curbing the activities that do drain us of time, money and energy. Hope these tips are useful - they sure were to me and the folks in Chicagoland!