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Deck the Hall? Break The Rules, Instead
Many boomer “grands” have figured out how to enjoy holidays with the next generation – they do what they love.
Joyce Griffin, for example, starts seasonal sewing for her five grandchildren in the fall. By Christmas and Hanukkah she'll have finished four dresses and a boy's camp shirt. She loves making these gifts, as she did making clothes for her four children. Everyone loves getting them.
This may sound like too much work to boomers who juggle demanding jobs, aging parents, living-at-home children and whatever crisis is at hand. Add decorations, food, presents and visitors – and many may doubt there will be energy left to play with the young ones.
But the key to quality holiday time with children is to be laid-back and well-organized, Griffin and others say.
CHOOSE ONLY A FEW TRADITIONS
Planning starts with deciding what you want to do and don’t want to do – and sticking with your decision.
Choose which traditions you want to keep. Let others do things you want to delete and they want to maintain.
Patti Pickering, a Richmond fitness specialist for midlife and older adults, made such a decision.
“From my perspective as a single mom for 15 years,” Pickering said, “it seemed to me for a long time that doing the traditional Christmas with extended family was not fun.”
Three years ago, she and her three daughters decided to “do Christmas on our own terms.”
“Our time together is gathering as a family, cooking and having silly fun. We focus in on what we value and leave off what society says you have to do.”
For her, cooking counts. Pickering rose before dawn one Christmas Day to bake her great-grandmother’s pound cake and chicken pie – her daughters’ favorites.
DO WHAT YOU REALLY ENJOY
Shop, wrap and cook as much as possible before the rush. If you don’t enjoy cooking or want to simplify, give yourself a break – let a caterer prepare some of the dishes.
“Most people don’t like to do turkeys,” said Lisa Granger, executive chef at Green Monkey caterers, which specializes in healthy food that children like. “For 15 to 20 people, that’s a pretty massive turkey.” Many professional clients tell her they don’t consider holiday cooking to be good use of their time.
Instead of wearing yourself out with decking the halls, make decorating a family activity. Include the very old, frail and unmarried. These folks added rich texture to our childhood Christmas Eve decorating, supper and church routine. Great-grands, aunts, uncles and extended kin told stories that were unavailable elsewhere.
Prepare child-centered activities for inside and outdoors. For example, Rosanne Ostrowski, a certified massage therapist, bags crafts and games from discount stores for her seven grandchildren. They play with projects while she and two daughters fix ham, mac & cheese – their traditional Christmas fare.
Simple rules help, said Ostrowski, who comes from a large Polish-Italian family where “having lots of people around was part of the holidays.”
“Really, what I do is to not get caught up in my house staying neat. The kids play hide and seek and go everywhere. At 8:30, they know it’s time to be quiet. So I have my time to unwind.”
YOU CAN CHANGE THE RULES
Boomers, who’ve always marched to our own drums, are mature enough and young enough to have fun changing the rules.
Griffin’s Catholic-Jewish family, for instance, no longer buys presents for everyone. They draw names so each person buys a present for only one relative, she said.
“We all feel like Christmas is really for the children,” she added.
Griffin sings in four church services, ending with Christmas midnight Mass. Then she puts meatballs in the Crock-Pot and turkey in the oven for the open house she and her husband, Gene, host Christmas Day.
“By then, everything else is done. I've been doing it for over 30 years, so I’ve got it down to a science.”
Contact Betty Booker, a retired Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter/columnist, at
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