Beckie is hosting this series to create awareness about mental health,

Working On Us

Topic: Managing Good Mental Health During The Holiday Season:

Question Prompt:

1. Do you have a stable relationship with your family and/or friends during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season?  If your answer is (YES), please give us an example of what the holidays are like with family and/or friends?  If you answered (NO), Please explain to us why not?

2. Do the holidays trigger certain memories of people, places, and things?

3. Do you have a favorite holiday, if so which one and why?  (Note: This does not have to be based on the current holidays coming up either).

4. If you stress out during the holidays, what is the best way that you handle stressors?

5. Do holidays tend to make you melancholy?  If so why? and how do you go about dealing with the depression that takes place?

6. This is a question that anyone can answer if they feel so inclined… Do you think that the holidays are shoved down our throats every year a little quicker with each passing year?  (Meaning, Halloween finished October 31st, and Christmas stuff was on the shelves October 15th), Does this trigger an emotion in you too early?

7. Does your family/friends show understanding and compassion during a moment that might be hard to handle on your own?

8. Do you even bother celebrating the holidays with family/friends?  If you answered this question (NO), what is it that you do during the holiday?  (If you answer, I try to sleep through it… It’s a fair answer).

9. Do you avoid holiday music and TV specials during this time?

Prompt #2

If you don’t feel comfortable answering these questions, you can write a narrative of your favorite holiday memory and the worse, but please explain why?

Rules:

• Write your own post and create a pingback to the original post here.

• There are no right or wrong answers.  Write in any format you see fit.  (Answer’s, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, poem, short prose…anything, and/or narrative).

• You can do one or all prompts.

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I really admire how Beckie is promoting mental health awareness and has opened up a discussion on many taboo subjects.

Holidays are always tough for most people, for those who are and those who aren’t suffering from any mental illness.

Holidays mean getting together of family.

Family members are often at odds with each other.

Family members who haven’t met each other for a long time.

And lastly, family members who have expectations from others, which are not likely to be met.

This is a recipe for stress if not outright disaster.

In the past, I would always invite my family and my husband’s family on holidays to have dinner together. But though I have an okay relationship with my brother and his family, the siblings of my husband were not so congenial. The dinner itself would be stressful but the gathering of so many people would invariably result in ruffled feathers of one or more people. There would be perceived slights to which either the older generation or their children would react. This went on until my father and my husband’s parents were alive. They expected us to host this dinner annually. After their passing away I gradually tapered off this tradition and now we just get together with our kids, with no pressure on them to come if they are busy elsewhere. Life has become so much easier this way!

The problem with family is that we expect too much. And too many people means too many egos. So I have fixed this problem by making the meal totally informal and just close family invited.

As for the commercialization of holidays and celebrations, this is such a sore point for me, as I am sure it is for a lot of us. They literally shove the days down our throats and want to make money by selling us stuff that we neither want nor need.

Someone, please make them stop!!!

I hope that in this narrative, I have answered most of the questions of prompt # 1.

Thanks, Beckie for another good topic.

#Keepitalive

#WorkingOnUs