Do you love the holidays but hate the family pressures that seem to pop up this time of year?

Are holidays a source of stress rather than enjoyment? Have you and your partner ever felt split in two over holiday arrangements? Are you wondering how on earth you are going to make everyone happy? 

 

Here’s the key: Make sure your marriage is the family that comes first this holiday season 

 

The holidays can be hard for couples to navigate when it comes to making every family member happy. The fact of the matter is, you’re never going to accomplish that, so it’s important to remember that the family that matters the most is your own. Often couples get lost in all the demands put on them by various family members that they lose sight of the fact that their nuclear family is the most important. 

 

It may sound crazy, but in order to make everyone else happy this holiday season, you’re going to have to put your marriage first. Tackle the holidays as a team. This means you’re going to have to do a few things.

 

 Communicate 

 

In order to navigate the potential multiple holiday celebrations you and your partner will have to attend and coordinate, it’s important that the two of you talk about your wants and needs. If it’s really important to you to be with your siblings on Christmas Eve to uphold longstanding family traditions, for example, then there’s only one way for your partner to know that.

 

 You and your partner need to make sure you’ve communicated to one another the things that you really want and the things you really don’t. It’s equally as important to talk about what you don’t want the holidays to be like. The last thing you want is to find out later that your partner was miserable the whole time because you didn’t talk about the fact that he/she didn’t want to do something. 

 

Compromise

 

 Once you’ve talked about your wants and needs, the next step is to come up with some compromises. Maybe your parents are divorced and your partner has children from a previous marriage and the two of you are faced with decisions about who to spend the holidays with and when. Conflict is going to arise. The key is how you two handle it as a couple. And the most important thing is approaching these holiday challenges as a team. 

 

Whatever decisions you make, make them together. Your families of origin or chosen families will try to influence your decisions, but the important thing is to be on the same page with your partner.

 

 Maybe this year you aren’t going to see your parents because you spent Thanksgiving with them instead, but that doesn’t mean you can’t carve out 30 minutes with your partner to FaceTime with your parents. In this case, the compromise was already made by spending one holiday instead of another, but the act of FaceTiming shows that the two of you are willing to compromise to still see them in whatever way you can. And more importantly, you’re doing it together.

 

Manage Expectations 

 

The fact of the matter is, you can’t please everyone. You can’t be everywhere and everything for everyone. So be there for each other. Once you’ve talked about what you want and need from each other during the holiday season and you’ve compromised on plans, take some time to talk about what each of you hopes to get out of these experiences. 

 

Remind each other how wonderful it is to be together during the holidays. Show each other how lucky you feel to be together and sharing the holidays with your families. Holidays don’t have to be a source of stress if you and your partner are on the same page and, most importantly, spending the holidays together as a family.