The holidays arrive each year decorated with twinkling lights, family traditions, and the promise of joyful social connections. But tucked beneath the wrapping paper and festive ribbons is a less welcome package: Stress. For many parents, teachers, and caregivers, holiday stress can feel like an unwanted gift — one that shows up whether we’ve asked for it or not.
And yet, like the thoughtful sweater from Aunt Kathleen that isn’t quite our style, stress sometimes becomes surprisingly useful. When we learn how to anticipate it, prepare for it, and reflect on it, we can uncover hidden benefits. In fact, when stress is handled well, it can strengthen our relationship skills and build resilience for people of all ages.
This season, instead of letting holiday stress take over, we can choose to unwrap it with curiosity and even gratitude. Here’s how —

Why Holiday Stress Happens (even when we love the holidays)

Holiday stress isn’t a sign that something is wrong with us or our families. It’s a natural response to a season full of mixed emotions and extra pressures: disrupted routines, financial strain, family expectations, academic or work deadlines, travel, and feelings of loneliness — all mixed with joy and anticipation.
According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), emotional awareness and self-management are foundational components of social-emotional wellbeing. Holidays challenge both (and often at the same time).
But stress does not have to derail us. When we anticipate it, understand it, and respond with intention, we model positive decision-making and coping strategies for children, students, and even our peers.

Before the Holidays: Anticipate and Prepare

Preparing for the holidays doesn’t mean predicting every possible problem. It means planning for flexibility and building everyday habits that help us stay steady even when things get busy. Weekly family meetings, daily mealtimes, and dedicated classroom conversations (e.g., circles, homeroom, or advisory) offer opportunities to anticipate challenges and share strategies for dealing with them.
Child development studies find that children, especially younger ones, are more influenced by anticipatory pleasure than by the actual experience itself. In fact, people of all ages routinely overestimate how good something will feel, a pattern also observed in children during holidays, birthdays, or big events.
Children’s developing brains make them especially vulnerable to the gap between expectation and reality because imaginative thinking, limited understanding of time, and media influence can create larger-than-life mental pictures. Adults can help children manage holiday expectations, without dimming their joy, by co-creating realistic ‘holiday pictures’ and modeling flexible thinking.
Shared experiences – such as baking, decorating, and preparing for holidays together – produce more lasting happiness than material items. Parents and caregivers can invite children to excitedly anticipate doing, not just receiving. This shifts the child’s anticipation toward experiences, with the added benefit of accomplishing a holiday task together.

During the Holidays: Navigate Stress and Build Connection

Once the season is underway, the key skill is self-management — using strategies that help us stay balanced and flexible. These can be built into family rituals, which already help children develop meaning, belonging, and a coherent sense of family identity. We can start with proven relaxation techniques, like deep breaths, and gradually practice ways to respond and adapt as needed.
Holidays provide a natural opportunity for identity development through conversations about shared family values. Parents can take a short breather, pausing to ask: “What’s important to our family during the holidays?” and offer simple choices (e.g., kindness, generosity, togetherness, curiosity, gratitude). Adolescents especially benefit from chances to differentiate and articulate personal beliefs. The holidays can be a good time to invite children to express their own growing values by shaping family traditions. A parent might say: “What traditions matter most to you this year? What feels most meaningful?”
Families and educators can build a small ‘value menu’ of options and let each person choose one value to bring into the season, such as:

Helping others
Celebrating cultural or spiritual roots
Connecting with family
Learning about another tradition
Making something meaningful

These activities can support social- and self-awareness, as well as consensus-building and responsible decision making. Families can also share gentle age-appropriate stories about holidays that didn’t go perfectly but still became cherished memories.
Even with preparation, children may still feel disappointed. Adults can scaffold resilience by using techniques to strengthen emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility. Caregivers can open productive conversations by helping children name a feeling (e.g., “It seems like you’re feeling let down”), reassure them that the experience is normal (e.g., “It’s okay to feel that way – many people do”), and support them as they generate a meaningful solution (e.g., “What else could we do right now to make this moment feel special?”)
Children can deepen family and community connections through their holiday experiences. One easy way to create a ‘values moment’ is to pause before meals, gift exchanges, or outings. Take 30-60 seconds to reflect on how each person can show kindness or consider who might need extra care or attention to participate fully.
Rituals promote emotional bonding that can improve the quality of our relationships — across generations, families, and communities. Special traditions allow children to practice leadership roles, too. They can choose a song, lead a toast, or organize a small act of giving. These simple acts develop self-efficacy, a protective factor for building resilience.

After the Holidays: Reflect and Reframe

The natural slowdown after the holidays is a perfect time for children and adults to integrate experiences. Reflecting on expectations, emotions, and the meaning of the season helps children develop their metacognition. This is an important skill for effective learning and independence. Start with a short, nonjudgmental question or values debrief:

Conversation starter: “What worked?”, “What didn’t work?”, and “What did we learn?”
Values debrief: “Which values did we practice this season?”, “Which ones felt most important to you?”, “What do we want to keep next year?

On the trip home, parents can take an ‘energy inventory’, by asking each family member what brought energy, what drained it, and what could change next time to make the holidays healthier. Since children’s regulation issues often peak when routines restart, this can be a useful segue for recognizing shifts in energy and talking about the need to adjust sleep schedules.
Sending ‘thank you’ notes to teachers, relatives, or neighbors reinforces empathy and fosters family and community wellbeing. The post-holiday days — before school and work ramp up – may offer quiet time for creating scrapbooks together. Consider adding photos, small mementos, and notes about challenging moments that the family overcame together as ‘resilience snapshots’ that are a natural part of our life experiences.
In the end, holiday stress may still arrive on our doorstep like an unwanted gift, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. When we take time to anticipate, navigate, and reflect on the season’s challenges, stress transforms from something burdensome into something surprisingly strengthening — a reminder that with intention, connection, and compassion, we can unwrap even life’s messiest moments and find resilience inside. ❦

About the Author

Patrice helps communities come together to support children and families. As co-author of Leading by Convening, she teaches practical ways to bring partners into joint problem-solving and collective action. She founded Collective Learning Consulting, offering public engagement training, leadership courses, Communities of Practice coaching, and tailored consulting grounded in her decades of experience in education and social learning.

Education

Emerson College (BA), Harvard University (M.Ed.), The George Washington University (Ed.D.)

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). CASEL 5 Framework. Https://casel.org
American Psychological Association. Stress and Coping.
Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Building Resilience.
National Association of School Psychologists. Helping Children Cope During the Holidays.
Gottman Institute. Emotion Coaching Resources.

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