Family is a blessing, but sometimes handling all the personalities in one room can be a tall order. Here are a few ideas for maintaining your sanity while everyone’s around over the holidays:
1. Know who’s coming. If you know who you’re expecting, then you can anticipate the dynamic. Prayerfully, your family is one of low drama (but usually, there’s always one…) so see if you need to do any advance mental preparation before everyone gets together. đ
2. Give everyone something to do. In our family, everyone is often so helpful that it just leads to a lot of opinions flying all over the place and making it harder to actually tackle the tasks at hand. Assigning everyone who asks to help something different to do will make life a lot easier (especially in the kitchen!) when the time comes. Let family members handle different dishes or courses of your holiday meal, or assign them different roles to even get some people out of the house during particularly hectic times (airport runs, grocery store runs, kid entertainment… you name it).
3. Don’t turn down help. This is a hard one for me, as I tend to be rather particular about how I like things done and usually prefer to do things myself. Truth be told, as long as you have somewhat of a system in place (see #2) letting others help out really can make everything easier. And then you don’t have to worry about resenting the lazies who just lay around while you stare at dishes and chaos everywhere.
4. Plan for the little ones. This is particularly important during meal prep time. Little people running through the kitchen while oven doors are opening and closing and prep is happening on every flat surface you can find is never a good setup. Choose a room (or a whole level!) where you can set up games, toys, or a general “Kid Zone” that you can banish the little ones to until dinner is ready. This keeps them entertained and out of trouble while you get everything together for dinner and arriving guests.
5. Realize that, no matter how crazy they are, family is family and you love them for it! Face it, it just wouldn’t be as much fun if everyone was “normal.” Family is a blessing, and being able to spend time together is something to be thankful for in itself.