Best of: How to Be in "High Magic, Low Effort" Mode This Holiday Season

0:00You survived the Miami weekend, nailed the speech, and maxed out your credit card in the name of friendship. Now you've got one hangover, four pastel dresses, and zero reasons to wear them again. Sell them on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. And you at least get some of your dignity, money, back. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Depop. Where taste recognizes taste. you're like I want the magic but I don't want to make the magic your dream is real what fresh hell laughing in the face of motherhood I would show up and I'd sing a few songs I had like a set show and then I'd be like and here he is and he'd come in with Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson somebody gonna be screaming and crying and hiding between your legs and being like I don't like that Santa yes that will happen a podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas so you don't have to had I checked with my family, it was a priority to nobody that I make these incredibly complicated cookies.

1:03And then I was mad nobody wanted them. Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we're talking about our holiday goals, which are? We have two. Less doing, more magic. Yeah, I love this. And I think, you know, this has been thematic for us in a ton of ways. And I think it's really interesting as our kids start to get older and their relationship with Christmas changes, that I'm finding the pushback or my push to kind of scale everything down. It's challenging. Like, although they are kind of aging out of some of the magic of Christmas, they don't want less.

1:52That's for sure. I mean, they're not like, let's tone it all down, you know? It's not happening. I want to start with something one of our listeners, Tiffany, said. She said, I am a make magic girl. I enjoy doing the things I do pick and choose, though. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Are you, because I'm not sure I know the answer, are you a make magic girl? Are you into Christmas? 10 ,000%. I mean, I am a, I love Christmas. I love the magic of it. I loved it as a kid. I still love it as an adult. My nephew was just here and saying, well, when does Christmas really start? And I said, okay, this is not, he said, do you have an opinion on that?

2:30I said, I don't have an opinion. I have a fact. Christmas starts the moment Santa appears in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. That is the beginning of the Christmas season. You know, that used to be my job in my younger years. One of my many acting jobs was being Mrs. Santa, not in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but at different malls around the United States. I would show up and I'd sing a few songs. I had like a set show and then I'd be like, and here he is. And he'd come in and it was one of my favorite acting jobs ever. I worked as an elf at the World Trade Center. That tells you a little bit how long ago this was for a real beard Santa.

3:06And I can't say I loved it. It paid really well. It was like 500 bucks a day that gig. It was such a good gig. Which right for an out of work actor back then was a lot of money. I could write an essay about it except for that David Sedaris has already written the what do you call it formative essay on being a Christmas elf, but yeah, he got a whole career out of it. 90 % of the job is keeping children from assaulting Santa. Like, it's funny, like you're basically a Secret Service agent, dressed in a merry way, because kids, sweet, you know, gigantic 12 year old kids would take a running leap from like 10 feet away to leap upon Santa's lap.

3:47And Santa was, he was a real beard Santa. He was an older gentleman. And he was a human being. He couldn't handle the beard was real. Everything, everything was real. And so was his bad hip. And yeah, exactly. He could not handle the leaping children. So make magic. Am I a make magic girl? I'm gonna ask myself that. And the answer is sometimes. Definitely when my kids were little, I really dug it. This year, I am not feeling it. For many reasons, I am not really feeling it this year. And I'm like Hodor and the people at the door are like, when you have your kids lists, I really want to get started in my shopping or here's my kids list so you can get started in your shopping.

4:28And I'm like, go away. I don't I don't want to do it this year. But I do. I mean, it's also the only thing that will save me. Yeah, I am similar. I had a long talk with my sister yesterday, who I think is feeling this times 10. And what we came to is lean in with boundaries, basically. I think sometimes this time of year can obviously, for a lot of reasons, be depressing and kind of remind you of what's not there. We've both lost parents. And I think that it comes up really hard around the holidays. and there's a lot that can feel bad. And I don't think it's smart to try to be in denial about that and be like, what?

5:12I'm just a merry elf. There's nothing wrong. It's okay to say like, this is a time of year where I really miss my mom, miss my dad. Those are very real feelings. But I think sometimes there's a temptation and especially when we feel like the merrymakers and put upon in those ways to kind of cut off our nose to spite our own face, truly. You know, that like, I'm going to show everyone how miserable I am by being a Grinch. And I think that that instinct, because, and I think we've talked about this with birthdays, I think it can become a little bit like, I have a huge tendency to do this on my birthday.

5:51I know my husband's going to mess it up. I know he doesn't have enough prepared. So rather than say anything about that or do any guidance, I'm going to sit back. Like, who's the guy in Lord of the Rings who like my precious, my precious Gollum, like Gollum, I'm going to stroke the orb of how everyone has failed me. I feel like it's a little different that, you know, we talked about being kin keepers earlier this year, a term that was new to me at the time, but I certainly know what it is. And I am the kinkeeper. I'm the tree decorator, present spreadsheet keeper. And I don't feel like doing it this year.

6:29And it isn't necessarily that I want to like, make sure everybody has a lame holiday season. It's that I want somebody else to do it this year. I want somebody else to keep me instead of being the kinkeeper this year. But it's probably not going to happen. So you need to like figure out how to get going, get some hot chocolate or something and get moving. I think we often have the advice, and I think it can feel like another job and frustrating to invite people into the kin keeping with us and to kind of give voice to that, to say, hey, for whatever reason, I'm really struggling this time of year.

7:02you know, my husband has been traveling for work a ton. And I was kind of like you in grades, you don't even see that I'm doing this all by myself. And I kind of had to check myself at a certain point. And I sat my kids down and I said, Listen, I need more help. As you know, dad's off in the great beyond. So I really need you all to pitch in and be my helpers, because I'm struggling to get everything done. And I feel like my kids, it doesn't mean that they suddenly like don elf hats and are like, well, I will do everything and it'll be fun. But leave it to me. I think it's fine to invite people in, you know, my sister and I had a really frank conversation and said, like, let's do gift exchanges.

7:50And let's lean in on what the present lists really look like? And who can we take off of them? And how can we do it less? You know, we were originally kind of like, let's just forget it and just forget about gifts this year. And after a week, I think that both of us kind of felt like that's going to feel depressing. But the instinct is coming from a real place. So like, can we find a solution? Well, so we asked our listeners. Oh, I know they're going to solve it for us. They are. There's some really good level setting advice in this episode. So we asked our listeners on our Facebook group and page, you can find them both at WhatFreshHellCast or just searching WhatFreshHellPodcast on Facebook.

8:29We asked, how do you resist the urge to do all the things for and with your family members during the holidays? Which is funny. For us, it's like, how do you get the urge to do any of the things is what we've been talking about so far. But this is how do you resist the urge to do everything, feel bad when you're falling short? How do you lessen the burden while retaining the magic? because yeah, I want the magic. I don't want the burden. That's what we're all about. And I will say before we dive into our brilliant listeners, that I think that sometimes we feel this very strongly before the season begins.

9:05It's like seasonal dread in a way. And then I sometimes find that like once I get the lit candy canes up and I'm playing the music, it carries me along a little bit. Uh-huh. I think you're right. Well, Lisa had some advice that I think is maybe worthwhile for me. Lisa says she lessens her time around the people who do all the things. And she sticks to two or three traditions, makes it more special than doing all the things and cramming it in. Huge. This is something that I'm working on as I get into like the college season of my life is just, as you say, like putting that slip of paper, taking that extra breath when I'm involved in conversations that are like, Like, well, my child with their 12 APs and eight varsity letters and 19, you know, buildings that they've built are.

9:54And that feeling comes up of like, why are you attacking me? And why are you this way? And why are you stabbing me in the face and trying to kind of say that's the way they've chosen to do things. And we have chosen to do things a different way. And both of those things are actually fine. Yes, that's right. The person who has all of her Christmas shopping done already, except for your kid, and she's asked, you know, three times for the list and a list that you are somehow responsible for preparing in today's world, that that's, you can feel anxiety from that, which is not intentional. That is just somebody doing it differently than you do it.

10:33Right. And you can say, I don't have that. Cassie says, the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas are our days we look forward to. We don't schedule anything on those days with people outside of our household. The day after Christmas is my favorite day of the whole year to just wear pajamas all day, snack to our heart's content, and enjoy gifts. Yeah, I kind of feel like nobody expects you to do anything else the day after Christmas. Maybe it's like pile in the car and go see Aunt Martha, but I feel like everybody just stays home the day after Christmas. I mean, the day after Christmas is my sister's birthday, so we're just rolling right into birthday celebrations.

11:09Oh, you roll right into that. I will say this is not a tip for everyone, but this is how we do it. And it works for me. Your mileage may vary, as they used to say on the internet back in the day. The day after Thanksgiving, I find that I often have 20 people still hanging around at my house who need something to do. And you know, we decorate the whole house for Christmas because I got 20 people. I got 40 hands. I'm like, let's go. We're turning on Christmas music and the kids are generally really into it and it's free labor for me and it's a fun activity and we get a big tray of bagels and hot cocoa and turn on the music and let's all decorate the house.

11:49It's kind of a trick on my part because I'm just forcing people to put up decorations in my house and then by that day, it's all done. I don't know. And it's like, okay, we're rolling right from one thing to the next. I like it. That's a great idea. We have both sides of our family this year are gathering in the same town because my husband and I are from the same town. Anyway, we're and big families. I mean, we're gonna have like two dozen kids between the ages of two and 21 staying at various houses. And that day after Thanksgiving, that weekend is like now what that can get a little long. I feel like after Christmas, you're playing with your new toys.

12:25Now come decorate my house for free. That's my answer. Right? Today after Thanksgiving, if you're not going to Best Buy at 5am, then what are you doing all day. So my husband, smart idea, he called up a local grade school and we're renting their gym for a couple of hours for not very much money. And we're going to let those kids descend and run around, which I think will buy us some peace, some peace before and after. Yeah, especially on the Northeast, it's often cold. And so you can't really do the like, all right, here's a football, everyone go play in the yard. Michelle, I love this idea. And a lot of listeners had different versions that she and her kids talk about the top three most important Christmas things to do.

13:06You ask your kids what they are. Everybody has their three. Maybe you don't do everybody's all three, but if somebody's appears on more than one list, you do. So she asked her kids for the top three Christmas things, and two of them were Watch Muppet Christmas Carol. Okay, I think I can arrange that pretty easily. Okay, yes. And to do a Christmas Eve dance party. Michelle says, we started this in Christmas 2020 because it was depressing because they weren't going to see anybody. They wanted to make it fun. So they had a Christmas Eve dance party. And now her kids are like, OK, number one, we're definitely doing our Christmas Eve dance party.

13:38And number two, we're watching a movie. I love this idea, too, because I think that we sometimes as the magic makers and the kinkeepers are like, oh, then we've got to have the screening of Rudolph. And then I've got to make that crab soup that I make. And then I've got to, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I've got to do the special box that I wrap with new pajamas and packs of hot cocoa. That's a now thing that we've done. And I really like the idea of asking your kids, because I think there can be times where we're, this is the famous story that I've told many times that my grandmother told my mother, how could you have Thanksgiving without cream white onions?

14:16And my mother spent hours making cream white onions and passed them to my grandmother who said, oh, I don't really like them. Right. And it's like, right, you just think that there should be cream white onions on the table because you used to have them in 1911 on the table, you know? And I really like this idea of focusing in or in like, what are the things that are important? And we do a funny, they started during the pandemic too, this area, they have a dam that has like a little driving area around it. And there's drive-through, light-up, you know, silly things, like a light-up elf throwing presents and stuff.

14:49My kids still love it and they're teenagers, you know, but it's like that's part of our tradition. There's a restaurant we go to and like that's what we do. Yeah. And what it is, it isn't roasting chestnuts one by one, right? It's like driving them to see these lights. I think I can manage that. Okay, we'll be back with even more ways to do less and make more merry. Amy, when you take Nutrafol every day and you know that I do, every day can be a good hair day. So many good hair days around here, Margaret. Killing it. Nutrafol is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand.

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18:06Use code FRESH at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Corps half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with the code FRESH. This is another Amy. She has some very good advice. She says, I try to remember that some things will just be better once the kids are older. This is not the year to decorate a gingerbread house because they're too little. There is time for the complicated stuff and that time may be next year. I so second, third and fourth this and having kids who are grown someone was asking the other day about picky eaters on the Facebook group. And I thought I had the pickiest eaters in the world and Amy had older kids and would say I don't know they just grew out of it.

18:53I'm like, no, no, no. Tell me how tell me when tell me what date they stopped just eating a roll at Thanksgiving. And the reality is now I don't remember. But now my kids, I mean, I just put stuff on the table and they eat it, you know, and are there kids who don't still love salad? There are. And are there kids who there are certain things they will not eat? There are. But I do think that the making a gingerbread house is merry. If it's not, it's great to acknowledge that, you know? Right. Or leave it for next year or leave it for not this year. Although I will say Target and Trader Joe's both make gingerbread houses where everything's like pre-cut.

19:36I mean, they are easy. Like a five-year-old can do this with a little bit of advice. So it's like you're guaranteed to succeed if you get one of those gingerbread houses. It doesn't have to be ready for good housekeeping. Yeah. Although someone just gave us a Halloween-themed one very nicely. They came over for something and brought a Halloween-themed gingerbread house. A Halloween gingerbread house. And the amount of guilt I felt not assembling that Halloween gingerbread house, it crushed me. And then I finally just put it in the closet. And I was like, well, maybe we'll do it later. Or maybe one cold day in February, we'll make it.

20:08But we just didn't get to it. I'm sorry. Well, you have to be aware of that stuff, too, I think, right? Like my kids and their cousins used to get very complicated Lego things when they were really too young to put them together. And so it turned into watch my father-in-law put them together. And then somebody would bump it, you know, two hours into the process. And there'd be wretched sobbing because it fell apart. It's like, why are we getting a six-year-old a 7 ,000-piece Lego set? So they can watch their grandfather put it together. This doesn't seem like making Christmas bright. And while he like, yeah, says bad words.

20:43Exactly. Anna says, it's okay if everything isn't every year. Most years we decorate cookies, but sometimes we don't. We often do the zoo light tour, but sometimes we don't. You can do it next year if this year isn't the year. Make your absolutely must-do list very short. I love this. And this is, I go back to that suggestion of talking to your kids. I mean, I think that I sometimes feel, it's a famous story in my family where I had my grandmother and her sister both lived into their 90s. And when I was in high school, they were in their 90s. And I would go every Sunday as a high schooler and drive over and pick them up and take them to church and then take them to IHOP afterwards and then drive them home.

21:31It was like my good deed. I was like, polish up my halo. I'm going straight to heaven. Every Sunday, I'm taking grandma and Mary to church and IHOP. And then at some point, my grandmother said to my mother, oh, sweet Meg, she just loves IHOP. Like she didn't want to go. Like I was dragging them to the IHOP basically. And I think that you have to watch that you're not dragging people to the IHOP thinking you're doing such a good deed, you know? This was good advice I hadn't really considered. Tiffany says she tries to stay off social media more in December to avoid the feeling I should be doing all the things.

22:06We have plenty of fun things we already do. I don't want to feel the need to do more because of what others are sharing. I think this is definitely true. I mean, I live in New York City. And so you see people like, we're at the Rockettes. We're at the Nutcracker. Here we are. And then you think like, oh, shoot, I need to figure out a day for us to go to the Nutcracker. I mean, maybe, maybe next year, right? Maybe never. Maybe nobody really wants to go in your house. But if you look at social media, you feel like you have to be have all your kids in their matching tartan plaid outfits in front of the tree.

22:36Yeah. And then I think that sometimes when you do something, we my mother in law, and I took my daughter to the Nutcracker when she was maybe seven or eight. She was in the tartan plaid with the bow and the like big skirt. You're there for the gram. We were so there for the gram. We were taking pictures in front of the fountain at Lincoln Center and we went and we had a great time. And I do think maybe we went in 2019. And so then it was 2020 and there was no Nutcracker, whatever happened. But then it starts to, it can easily feel like now we go to the Nutcracker every year. Oh, we have to go to the Nutcracker.

23:12And my husband and I used to love in Los Angeles. They have a sing-along Messiah. They do Handel's Messiah with a beautiful chorale, but then you sing along with the big choruses. And we loved it. And then we moved to New York and, oh, well, what are we going to do about our sing-along Messiah? That's our tradition. We went to one in the city and it was genuinely not as fun. It just wasn't, I don't know, they didn't do it as well. For us, it wasn't the same. And the next year we're like, okay, we found ourselves sort of like painfully buying another round of tickets to the bad singalong messiah.

23:49And then we thought, we could just not go. We could just not go to the messiah. What about that concept? But it's funny how weirdly your brain is like must slog through the messiah singalong because it's what we do. I have like the opposite thing, an opportunity being presented to me right now for Christmas, which is in Brooklyn. There's a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Diker Heights where people just go ham with the Christmas decorations. I've never been. I've only heard about it. It's like that jingle all the way movie come to real life. And it's one of these things like, oh, it's bucket list.

24:25You have to go. You have to see the lights in Diker Heights, which for people who weren't from New York City, it's like an hour and 20 minutes from my apartment. You have to see the sights in North Carolina. Fly to Omaha to see the lights. Right. Like, okay, maybe I'd do that. So it's like, oh, yeah, I'll do that. Anyway, there's this fun, like, it's called Grab Your Group and Go. And I love it. And it's in New York, like, grab your group and go. We're going to go to this museum. We're going to go to this show. And so they're like, we're doing it. We have a bus. We're going to Diker Heights. There will be cocktails served on the bus.

24:53Grab your women friends. We are going to Diker Heights. And now it's like being handed to me. All I have to do is show up and get on the bus. That's your dream. You're like, I want the magic, but I don't want to make the magic. Your dream is real. I don't want to make the magic. Right. Right. But now I'm like, do I want to go? So I'm going. I'm telling you guys, I'm going because I know if I do, I'm going to come back like, you have to go see these lights. And right, I'm being given a very easy opportunity to go if I want to. And I think that's also a good question, because I do find myself and I think it is lingering from the pandemic a little bit.

25:23I don't want to. I don't want to. You know, I mean, we're doing our live shows and stuff. And it is, it's much harder to get an audience to come out to stuff. It's interesting, because I just think that people have fallen in love with their sofas. God bless them. Their sofas are comfy and there's good stuff on TV. I get it. But I think the flip side of you don't have to go to the Nutcracker every year is watch the story of I don't want to do anything. Like, are you just falling out of the habit of would it be fun to all pile in the car and put on the horrible Christmas. This light show that we go to has a radio station that plays Christmas music, but it's like Backstreet Boys singing some song that's called Don't Miss Me Santa.