The weather forecast might still be screaming “summer,” but the calendar betrays the truth: The holidays are going to be here before you know it. What’s usually billed as a jolly time of year can inspire dread — all the planning, all the spending, all the gathering can be exhausting, especially if you have a large family. Of course you’d like to put that off for as long as possible, right? Surely these conversations can wait until after Halloween.
But waiting too long can actually make the holidays more stressful — and can put undue stress on the women in your life, who often shoulder the burden of organizing and planning. One lollygagger who delays in committing to a plan can prevent the rest of the family from booking flights or buying necessary supplies. What can seem like an annoying text from your sister reminding you to RSVP for Thanksgiving in early October only adds to her mental load in planning a dinner for 20 people.
“There can be an enormous amount of invisible labor involved in making the holiday magic happen, and that labor falls disproportionately on women and caregivers,” Jamila E. Holcomb, a licensed marriage and family therapist and associate teaching professor at Florida State University, told Vox. “If one person is coordinating everyone’s flights, planning meals, buying gifts, arranging childcare, communicating schedules, and managing family conflict, this can cause significant stress. It also makes one person responsible for everyone else’s experience, which is an unequal division of labor.”
The pressure to plan the “perfect” holiday isn’t merely logistical. In our hyper-connected and visible culture, people may feel pressured to orchestrate a high-stakes production that somehow is meaningful, memorable, and Instagram-worthy. In other words, planning for the holidays can be its own form of labor these days. To help make the whole ordeal more manageable for everyone — not just the hosts or Type A family members — five experts offered their advice on sharing responsibilities and actually enjoying the season.
Getting ahead of this coordination can help minimize the stress on everyone in a few months. So even though end-of-year celebrations might be the furthest thing from your mind, the ideal time to start planning them is, I’m sorry to say, right now. Here’s why early fall is the ideal time to start bugging the family group chat about the holidays.
Planning early will save you money
Prices on many goods, from flights to groceries, have increased over the last year. Getting ahead of these purchases before holiday crunch time can help you secure the best price and budget. While there’s no exact date for when to find the cheapest flights, travelers shouldn’t wait to book their tickets believing the price of gas will come down, travel expert Katy Nastro told Vox. In general, Nastro suggested locking in domestic travel between three and seven months ahead of time and between four and 10 months before international flights. “If you can get everything set… by the end of September for Thanksgiving, you’re going to be in a better place than most people,” Nastro said.
The same goes for rental cars: reserve them now. Unlike flights, you don’t need to pay for them in advance, so you can always cancel the reservation if your plans change. Nastro recommends the platform AutoSlash, which aggregates prices from multiple rental companies. “With rental cars, there’s only so much inventory and you want to even make sure that you have that option if you need it,” she said.
Early fall is also a great time to start shopping for presents, especially if you’re on a tight budget or coordinating a group gift with multiple people. Content creator and actor Rachel Ann Thomas and her eight siblings begin brainstorming ideas for their parents’ holiday gift in September or October every year. When holiday and event planner Lance “Mr. Christmas” Devereux decided to buy his loved ones matching Christmas pajamas, he started tracking down everyone’s sizes and placed the order before November. The earlier you nail down your shopping list, the sooner you can start looking for sales and slowly making purchases to save your bank account in December and avoid the stress of paying express shipping on last-minute gifts.
You need time to create new traditions and to split the labor of creating them
The holidays tend to be a period of nostalgia, and some families may heavily rely on time-honored traditions. But if you’ve outgrown them or just want to try something different, now is the best time to determine what would be meaningful, fun, and low-stress. Maybe that’s changing the location of a celebration from a grandparent’s home to a cousin’s; maybe that’s going on a fabulous vacation. The sooner you start thinking about it (and then commit to it), the easier everything else will be.
Holcomb, the therapist, suggested asking your loved ones now what they want the holiday to feel like, what traditions or events matter most, and what they realistically have the capacity for. You can also ask if there’s anything new or different they’d like to incorporate this year. Then you can come up with a game plan for how to share planning responsibilities. “Our cultural expectations around the holidays can make it easy to confuse a ‘successful’ holiday with a highly productive one,” Holcomb said. “Making time to ask these questions is especially important because we can disrupt traditional relational patterns and roles that we have taken for granted as normal.”
Both Holcomb and Thomas recommend creating a shared calendar or spreadsheet to keep track of logistics and divide responsibilities. In Thomas’s family, it’s called the Thomas Christmas Itinerary, and her mother starts it every September. “It basically lays out what the itinerary is for the whole Christmas time,” Thomas said. “What activities we’re doing, when we’re going over to grandparents’ houses, even down to what our dinner menus are.”
A spreadsheet can also be helpful for assigning and delegating tasks so that one person doesn’t end up managing everything by default as things come together at the last minute. So once you’ve committed to a general plan with your family, start breaking things down further — and proactively ask people to take ownership of different events and tasks (e.g., choosing a movie to take all the kids to see together, buying the snacks, and figuring out who is driving everyone). “If you’re hosting, you don’t have to simultaneously be the chef, activities director, chauffeur, mediator, and person responsible for everyone’s enjoyment,” Holcomb said.
Advance planning allows for the downtime everyone craves
When you are able to take a broad view of the holidays without the time crunch, you can be more deliberate with the itinerary and build in breaks. Events can be planned with intention, not obligation, and you’ll be able to zoom out and see that your calendar is getting overloaded before you’re completely underwater. “Another priority should be adding rest into the schedule before you need it,” Emily Barry, the senior vice president of holiday planning at online stationery and art marketplace Minted, told Vox. “Protect mornings or evenings when nothing is planned. Give yourself permission to stay inside instead of attending another event.”
“Don’t try to make the schedule perfect — make it meaningful,” Barry said. “Pick the one or two moments that are most important for everyone to be together, and build the rest of the holiday around those anchors.”
Slow planning over the course of a month or two ultimately makes it easier to offer flexibility to family members who may have traveled a considerable distance, have young kids, or are juggling multiple celebrations, Barry said — and to be realistic about what you personally can handle. “The goal is to spend meaningful time together, not create an itinerary that everyone has to execute perfectly,” she said.
