The holiday season - whether you celebrate Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwaanza, Winter Solstice, Yule, Ephiphany, or Boxing Day - is upon us.
And let’s face it, the holidays are not always an easy time. Many of us have to stretch tight budgets even tighter for gift-giving. Many of us lost family this year and will find the holiday table one chair short and quite a bit less merry. For many of us the holidays just mean more stress and anxiety on top of already busy, stressful lives - the stress of travel, the stress of stirring up old family tensions, the stress of shopping in packed malls. Many of us will spend the holidays alone, and feel like outsiders crushed by the atmosphere of forced cheer. Some of us will turn near-homicidal just from the constant barrage of Christmas music and the tacky decorations. Many of us are still emotionally ravaged after 9/11.
In the BBQ Pit the other day, I suggested a holiday challenge to a poster who was anticipating a blue Christmas. I wanted to repeat that challenge here for that person and other posters, because I am serious about it and I wanted to separate the positive, constructive part from the negative post.
The SDMB Holiday Challenge has Three Parts (I added one, because I can). It starts on Thanksgiving Day and ends on December 31, 2001.
Part 1: Community Service
Between now and 12/31, find one charitable or kind thing that you can do for someone besides yourself. Write letters for Amnesty International. Spend a morning volunteering in a soup kitchen. Donate blood. Shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk and driveway when you do your own. Babysit your friend’s kids for an afternoon so she can get out of the house. Spend time at the local old folks home, read to an elderly person or the kids at Children’s Hospital. All it really takes is an afternoon or two of your time, and it will give you a break from focusing on yourself and the pressures in your life.
Part 2: Self-Care
Between now and 12/31, take excellent care of yourself. Get lots of sleep. Floss. Eat your vegetables. Make a little time to take a walk outside and get some fresh air. Turn off the local news. Masturbate.
Part 3: No Complaining
This is the hardest one. Complaining is the American pastime. Rants and complaints can be high entertainment and let off much needed steam, but too often complaining is a way for us to dwell on the problems and not DO anything about them. We rant on the boards, we go out to lunch with our colleagues and bitch about the boss, our SO says “honey, how was your day?” and we recite the whole tiresome litany again. Being unhappy takes a great deal of energy.
So this is an experiment: one month of sincere effort to complain less. No one is going to police you - but if you find yourself complaining about stuff, try to catch yourself in the act and stop. Make a “complaint” box and put a quarter in every time you catch yourself. Or, if you catch yourself complaining, force yourself to stop and come up with 2 solutions for whatever problem it is.
Well, anyway, this is how I’m going to try to spend the next 1.5 months, if anyone wants to join me. Post if you want to give me feedback on whether you think this is a good idea, unrealistic, total Oprah-iffic shite, whatever.
If you decide to try the challenge, let’s post back on 12/31 on how we did. Were you less stressed out? Were you even MORE stressed out from the pressure of not complaining and trying to squeeze community service stuff in? Were you inspired to continue community service, take better care of yourself, complain less?
