#22 Quiet Quitting: Holiday Edition
Whether it's holiday activities or holiday gifting, maybe it's time to do a little less.
Hi friend,
A week ago, precisely the morning after Halloween, it started. I started seeing Instagram posts about holiday collections. The ads during Thursday Night Football and the World Series suddenly featured snow and people wearing beanies (what we call toques up in Canada) and joyful gatherings with families. Then I started seeing ads on social media about “pre-Black Friday” sales; and then the holiday direct mail catalogues arrived — I see you, “A very Merry Maisonette” toy catalog. Then the juggernaut of holiday signaling arrived via the red Starbucks cup.
I love the holiday season. It’s where my favorite things — sweaters, baking, feeding people — all collide in a perfect cacophony of crumbs and warm-and-fuzzy goodness. But this year, one thing is different for the first time since having kids: I am not running a business that relies heavily on holiday sales. After I closed koko’s nest in early summer, I was looking ahead to this season thinking that I’d finally have so much more bandwidth to dedicate to making the holidays special for my family.
Instead, with my head out of the mindset of selling selling selling, my head has also fallen out of the mindset of buying buying buying. With more space to do more, I’m eerily drawn to doing less.
Quiet quitting: holiday edition
By now we’ve all heard of quiet quitting and we’ve also created our own version in some aspect of our lives. And I can’t help but think that we are due for some quiet quitting in our approach to the holiday season.
If you’re skeptical at this idea, let me offer some points to persuade you:
the kids won’t notice the difference between (a) your gung-ho, 120% dedicated holidaying effort, and (b) your “just enough” holidaying effort;
buying less will help us finally cool off the economy, force corporations to lower prices and correct our current inflation spiral (but don’t quote me on that — I’m no economist); and
as parents, we always complain about time being a thief, but perhaps it’s our frenzied holiday activities that are robbing us of time.
Here’s step 1, 2, and 3.
Many of us approach the holiday season with long lists and folders of long lists. We have the Thanksgiving menu list, the gift list, the family list, the work and coworker list. It’s an endless tally of all the to-do’s and to-buy’s that we process and tackle like robots.
Instead of starting with a brain dump of lists, let’s first figure out the most important feeling we want to evoke throughout this season. For some of us, we may really be craving moments of joy and delight. For some of us, it may be peace and stillness. For me, it’s that feeling of togetherness without distraction.
Most importantly, let’s dispel the notion that our holidays need to feel the same way for it to be an enshrined family “tradition”. Just because we wanted maximum delight with all the bells and whistles last holiday season doesn’t mean we can’t prioritize a feeling of peace and stillness this holiday season. Just because you bought enough Christmas lights to rival the Griswolds’ last year doesn’t mean you have to put them up this year.
Next, we have to do some visioning of what will actually help create that desired feeling this holiday season. And instead of making a laundry list of activities and gatherings, I invite you to design a single arc through the weeks on your calendar — like a song that builds to one intentional climactic point. This way, we (rightfully) emphasize the actual holiday and de-emphasize the season.
And finally, once we know the essentials of what we actually want for this holiday season, in order for this to be true quiet quitting, we need to (politely) decline the rest. We need to actively build in days of no holiday-ing. We need to tune out all the last-minute deals and frantic shopping. If your intended song this holiday season is an a capella rendition of Silent Night, don’t go browsing for Black Friday deals in the brass section, so to speak.
Quiet quitting, together.
With inflation and uncertainty in the economy, I find myself focusing on essentials — those things that are truly useful for building my life and my work. And as the holiday shopping begins in earnest, I think it’s useful to do a mental exercise of identifying those past gifts that have proved to be valuable and worthwhile.
When it comes to quality gifting, there’s one element of knowing the person (the better you think empathetically about the giftee’s needs and tendencies, the better we can imagine a quality gift). But there’s also an element of knowing what is out there (the more we get quality, unbiased recommendations on what is worthy of gifting, the better chances we have of matching a quality gift to the giftee).
With four young children, I am actively brainstorming for gifts right now… I imagine I am not the only one. In the comments below, I’ll share some of our biggest wins in terms of quality, durable gifts for kids (as well as some of the misses). And if you have any wisdom to share, please chime in. Knowledge is power, as they say.
As far as electronic devices, the Lunii storyteller is hands down our most valued investment. It’s an audio storyteller that functions much like an old school iPod. You can purchase new stories and choose-your-own adventures in many languages. You can even record your own audiobooks through their app and upload to the device.
We do a lot of long road trips AND our kids tend to get motion sickness when they look at books or screens. This device has always been in heavy rotation for many years.
We now have 4 kids all 2 years apart in age and for the littlest one especially, we are finding that there are few categories of play things that we don’t already have.
So one thing that’s become more important to us is you “sets” that we can keep building on. And our favorites are:
1. Magnatiles. We started with a small set and we have added more to the same set so that kids can build bigger things. The key is to pick a quality set at the beginning and invest into building on it.
2. Train set. It’s amazing how much all the kids have been into the train set. Brio trains, generic wooden tracks, and then some accessories by Areaware
3. Wooden blocks by Kapla. These blocks are shockingly simple and I would have never guessed how much the kids would love building things with these slim wooden blocks.
4. Legos. Timeless. We have mega blocks, duplo sets and the regular Lego’s. Most of them we have inherited from generous neighbors, and we continue to build our collection.
5. Snap circuits. My school age kids love playing with these. And we will likely keep building on our collection. So many possibilities!