Holiday Happiness: You Need to Relax

You have to relax when you’re shooting an arrow. You can’t be tense. And that just helps, in your day-to-day life. ~ Stephen Amell

The holidays are a very stressful time for everyone and an exceptionally hard time for some.  So, until the New Year I’ll be posting a Holiday Happiness post each day to try help folks out who are struggling.  As always you can reach out to me at Happinesskane@aol.com for a kind word or someone to listen. ~ Rev Kane

So the holidays are rolling in full on us, nine or ten days to Christmas.  You can tell, everywhere you go there are bloody Christmas carols playing incessantly.  Even doing the laundry this morning meant an hour and a half of Christmas carols.  You can also tell by parking lots, any lot where there are shopping opportunities, the lots are full.  Not just full, but also full of people who have turned parking into a bloodsport.  Constantly now there are people in their cars just sitting on that “good spot” where someone is just beginning to load their car before leaving.  Now it doesn’t matter if that person is 10 seconds or 10 minutes from leaving, they are going to sit there and completely and totally muck up traffic in order to save from having to walk another 100 feet.

The other thing that happens this time of year is parking lot stalking.  You know, as you walk out to your car, they roll ever so slowly waiting for you to get to your car so they can institute their sitting and waiting maneuver.  Heck, sometimes they’ll even get on their horn if you don’t leave soon enough.  I’m not always such a nice person and occasionally this time of year I’ll claim a little revenge on parking lot stalkers.  What I do, is that I’ll come out of a store and purposefully walk up the wrong aisle in order to get stalkers to follow me, only to cross across aisles just to watch them punch and try to rip around the aisle to get to my spot, which of course, is another aisle over from the original aisle in the opposite direction.  Like I said, not always such a nice guy.

For me this mean little game is a bit of relaxation in this season.  People get really worked up, stressed out, people are hurrying around, heck on “Black Friday” there is even violence at times.  All of this hurrying and stress just adds to the pressure and bad feelings people have this time of year.  This stress can be the trigger to that dip into the well that we talked about last night.  So what’s the solution, well for me it’s scheduling time during the holidays for no other purpose than to relax.  I’ve talked before about the importance and benefits of relaxation and let me be clear what I’m talking about during the holidays.  We do lots of “relaxing” things during the holiday.  We go caroling, or tree cutting as a family, we have cookie baking parties and go to work holiday parties.  All of this, whether we want to or not, whether we enjoy it or not because it’s an obligation or a tradition.  Often some of our traditions serve no other purpose than to make one person happy and re-create the holiday stress of years passed.

So pick an afternoon, a morning or an evening, just for a couple of hours one day during the holiday season and just relax.  Go do something you really love to do, go bowling, or for a hike, sneak off to a coffee shop and watch some Netflix or read a book.  Go get a massage, that has multiple benefits.  Whatever it is, make it something that reduces your stress and just makes you feel good.  It will save your sanity a bit, make the holidays more enjoyable, maybe prevent holiday depression and help you have a happier days my friend. ~ Rev Kane