Holiday Hacks

0:28We always recommend Shopify. It just became like, literally, what are we doing? What fresh hell. Laughing in the face of motherhood. If you're not cooking, you're not looking. With Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson. I mean, a lot of the trouble starts because people are annoying. A podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas so you don't have to. Thanksgiving is not the time. You must try Gougeres or you're a bad kid.

1:01Hey, everybody. Welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. And this is Margaret. And today, we're talking holiday hacks. Amy, here it comes. Here it comes. Why are they so close together? Why is it like boom and a boom? Thanksgiving, Christmas. I have been working on that question at 3 a.m. in my mind for the last two decades, and I don't have an answer for you. Why are they so close together? Yeah, I don't know. I love Thanksgiving because you see your family like, Like, oh, this is great. See you in three weeks and we'll do it again. Like, there's something about it that's fun when everything's over, right?

1:34Like when you're sitting there having pie, it feels pretty great. But the other part that's hard. I also think that it's the dark times. And so we gather with lights and celebrations because it's the dark times. But yeah, could we not have Thanksgiving where it is and then Christmas the last week of February? That seems like it would be so much more pleasant. And yet they're far enough apart. Like I'm thinking my first job was working as a personal assistant, which meant, of course, doing like literally everything. Anyway, this woman would have a dinner party, but she would do two dinner parties.

2:06She'd do one Friday night and one Saturday night because once you're getting the flowers and once you have out the silverware and once you're like making little like smoked salmon on toast, just make extra and do it two nights in a row. That seems insane to me. Yeah. But three weeks apart, you can't use the same flowers. Also have a personal assistant. That seems to be the most important part of that story. I mean, it wasn't even just me. There are many people. Right. Have a giant staff making this happen, I think, would make it easier. That's my tip. I think thematically this year we've been talking a lot about the river that carries us along through life and that a lot of happiness comes from getting off the river and sitting with your spouse, children, family members and saying, is this river going where we want it to go?

2:53Is this journey going how we want it to go? Do we have the right supplies? Does everyone still want to be on the boat? I'm pushing the metaphor as far as it'll go, but it all goes back to my go-to piece of advice from my pediatrician, which was child care should be 50-50. 50 % the mom's needs and 50 % the child's needs. And we never talk that way. We generally talk 100 % what's good for the baby, right? What does the baby need? And I do think that what do you want your holidays to look like? The older I get and the older my kids get, I feel like when you're a new parent, you're on the rapids of the river.

3:37There's no pulling the boat over. You're just trying to survive the ride, right? You're not like, let's pull over to the side and talk about everybody's needs. You're just like grab an oar and try to save our lives as we go over these rapids. But I think it's worthwhile to say, are we still doing the holidays like we were doing them 10 years ago for reasons that we don't even remember? Right. And at what point does it get handed over? Say your parents are doing it. If our parents are doing it still like, it might be time for somebody else to take over, then who's going to take over? And do you really want it to be you?

4:08Because if you bring it up, he who smelt it, dealt it, the corollary to that is he who mentions should mom really be doing Thanksgiving still has to host Thanksgiving. Right. She who mentions hosts. It's a very good point. Gets the most work. Yeah. Yeah. And we're coming up now. We usually travel at Thanksgiving and we are coming up against the thing that it's only a four day weekend for us. We only get some schools take off Thanksgiving week. Our school only closes Thursday and Friday. So to make the trip to see family in Texas, in our case, it's like, OK, we always take Wednesday off of school because it's a non-day.

4:46We don't care. Right. Right. But even then, you know, we have two sets of family in Texas. You get on the plane, you get there. The next day is Thanksgiving. Like it's time to hit the ground running and start cooking. and then Friday is another family visit and then it's like Saturday and then you're home on Sunday. It just feels a little bit insane to be doing it. It gets harder. I mean, so I'm like, my kids are five years ahead of yours, right? Like, for those of you who might be new listeners, Margaret's oldest is the same as my youngest. So my kids are now 18, 21 and 22. I had to think about that.

5:21My 22 year old is actually not going to be with us for Thanksgiving this year. And we're trying to plan the Christmas where he can be there for some of it. and who is going to be where and who wants to be where and who's bringing somebody with them. Like all this stuff is just beginning to enter the chat in my own family. That's not bad. It's just more things to consider. It's a move from your parents host Thanksgiving and you all go home to see mom and dad. To mom and dad are getting older, maybe not here anymore. Now the second generation, I mean, it's not necessarily that you're all going to be together every holiday.

5:57It's like people do their own things. They have their own families. And those transitions can be painful. There can be hurt feelings. There can be very different ideas. I was just watching TikTok and the Kardashians came by. I don't even follow the Kardashians. But one of the sisters was like, we always do Christmas morning at my house. That's their like Kardashian tradition. And the other sister was like, well, my kids want to stay home this year. And they were having a big fight about it, which I'm sure partly is because they're on reality TV. But I do think that when it changes from your parents are in charge of the holiday and you're told what to do, then the next generation has to make their own decisions about what to do.

6:37And by the way, Uncle Ted doesn't speak to Aunt Bobby since 1973, so they can't be in the same room. So where are we putting everybody? It gets very complicated. is my number one holiday hack is take a moment, sit down with your spouse and your kids if they're old enough and say, what do we want our holidays to look like? What would our ideal be? And we're not only deciding for ourselves because that's not how it works. We're still 50-50. Who's the other 50 %? Maybe it's your parents who are still alive. Maybe it's your siblings who have expectations. We want to respect other people's traditions and needs, but we also don't want to just be on the river on the boat forever.

7:17Where like then everybody's kind of unhappy and miserable because we're all maybe making someone else happy. Right. But like somehow nobody's happy. I don't know how that math works. We're all ruining our lives to make other people happy and the other people are mad at us. Yeah. All right. So hack that for me. I mean, I think it's a genuinely probably tough, but just a conversation and it doesn't have to be a family meeting. You can just do it at dinner. hey the holidays are coming up what do we love about the holidays what do we hate about the holidays i as you know took a long-standing stance against elf on the shelf in our household and then one of my children snuck out and purchased an elf on the shelf and has been putting the elf the elf is already showing up no no this is going to happen after thanksgiving this is last year but the elf was zipliner across the living room and the cat got very excited by it and attacked the elf and drug it off into the woods.

8:16And the next day, the elf was like covered in bandages and leaves from the woods. And anyway, all this to say, the elf has become incredibly central to our holiday tradition in a way that I would have never seen coming. When I ask my kids, what do they like? They're like, I love the way that one of our family members, a child, is doing the elf. That has oddly become central. But it's just having conversations about what do we want? What are we keeping? What do we want to lose? And you have a famous rule, which I think is worth restating, which is? Let the laws of holiday attrition work in your favor.

8:51Let the laws of holiday attrition work in your favor. Which means if like, you know what, we're not going to do the Wednesday night pre-Thanksgiving turkey brine event this year because Kathy has a cough, then that goes off the calendar and you don't have to put it back on the calendar or the gift exchange. Let's not do the cousins this year. Let those things fall off and do not re-add them. We trade holidays. So we would do, you know, Christmas with my husband's family one year, Thanksgiving the next year. Early on, we realized, okay, we weren't going to be together for Christmas instead of shipping gifts and, okay, and then let's maybe figure out how we're all calling each other and acknowledging the blah, blah, blah.

9:33We realized that in January, there's a three-day weekend, which is Martin Luther King Day, we started doing a second holiday where we would get together with the family we didn't see and exchange presents on Martin Luther King. And we called it Martin Luther King Christmas. And it was a second whole Christmas, basically, with the meal and the gift exchange. And it seemed like a fun idea at the time. And the kids were really into it. Well, of course they were, right? Yeah, two Christmases. Yeah, more presents. Yeah, yeah. After two or three years, it just became like, literally, what are we doing?

10:06We are doing two full holidays three weeks apart. And it's insane. And one year, for one whatever reason, hopefully someone was pregnant, someone was having a baby, whatever happened, we didn't do it. And it was like, oh, my God, we've chewed our leg out of the bear trap. Don't step in it again. That is the end of Martin Luther King Day Christmas. And sometimes it's not that it wasn't fun. It's not that people didn't enjoy it. It's that it was too much. We have something like this in our family, too. And sometimes our kids be like, oh, my gosh, that was so fun when we did that extra Christmas a week early.

10:36You know, remember how fun that was? And it was fun for the kids getting double the presents. But you can say, yeah, that was fun. And then let the law of holiday attrition work in your favor and not be like, oh, gosh, I can only wrestle up the Christmas spirit to reestablish an exhausting tradition. You know what I mean? You can say that was fun. That was that time. That place was fun and special. And we're in a different place now. And I think gifts is a very important conversation to have because, again, you're soaking in it. You're moving along the river where we have probably in my family, I'm trying to do the quick math, I'm going to say 45 nuclear family members, like siblings and their children.

11:17It was kind of a default for a while that we would just all give each other gifts. And I mean, it was insane. We were spending four hours opening gifts. And the Christmas list was so onerous and unfun. And as you've described, it sometimes becomes like the great gift card exchange. Like, here's your Home Depot. Here's my Carrabba's Steakhouse. Like, I know you mentioned that you like that once. We have gone in my husband's one side of the family to all family secret Santa. And I have to say it was the most fun thing we've ever done. It's one of my new favorite holiday things because it is his siblings, their spouses, all of their kids and whoever happens to be visiting.

12:03We have a brother who's recently remarried with two new kids in the mix. We don't know very well. My sister sometimes comes. My sister-in-law is engaged to a guy from Finland. His father, who speaks no English, was there. Everybody in the room, which was probably 30 people, got a name. And so my sister ends up giving a present to my brother-in-law's new wife's daughter, who she's never met. But it's still really fun. My 13-year-old is giving a gift to a guy from Finland who doesn't speak English. Like, you got to figure it out. And then everybody gets one. I don't know if we put a$50 limit or whatever it was.

12:44But it was such a, first of all, it was such a fun way to get to know people. Like, here's my 13-year-old handing my brother-in-law to B's father his gift, and he's opening it, and they're having a moment together. I could not recommend the all-family secret Santa more. It builds bridges, and I love it. I'm so into it. We have some of those going, and I just was having a conversation with my husband, like, do you think we can move to this? Because when the kids are little, it's like, okay, everybody needs a toy from everybody, right, or a sweater or whatever. And now it's like, well, wait a minute.

13:15They're all in college now. Can't we all just be one adult group where you get one thing that's meaningful? I agree. It's a perfect law of holiday attrition. And not to be adorable about it, but it's actually kind of a fun learning. You got a 13-year-old who's suddenly on Google being like, what do 60-year-old men in Finland like? It makes you learn about other people in the family. I mean, weird Uncle Bob who sits in the corner and doesn't talk much. You had to figure out that he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. And like maybe he would want, I don't know, a book or something about helicopters.

13:51It's just a great way to connect family. Let's take a break. I want to underline something important you just brought up. Hey there, I'm Kendra Adachi. And my show, The Lazy Genius Podcast, helps you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. And you get to decide what matters. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to give you a new way to see. Episodes of the Lazy Genius Podcast are full of compassionate time management tips and permission slips to do what makes sense for you. New episodes drop every Monday. Follow and listen to the Lazy Genius Podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:28You were talking before the break about how important it is for your kids to have to figure something out and get something. And that's another crucial thing that it can be very hard to start doing if you haven't been doing it this way. and I'm still trying to do this going in my house is the kids buy presents for each other. It's no more, oh, you know, Sally's giving this to Bobby and neither Sally nor Bobby have any idea what this is because mom just bought it and wrapped it and thought about it. And like you do all the work and put their names in the name tag that the kid has to own the gift giving.

15:00It can be more work at first, but you're teaching a man to fish, if you feel me. And I think it's important because the kids get more out of it, obviously, that if they're like, I don't know what I got my cousin. Absolutely. And I think that less is more in this way that a kid who's got nine gifts to buy is going to go to Newberry Comics and go to the checkout line and just grab 10 pieces of plastic and hand them out. A kid who's got one gift to buy for a dude from Finland is going to take some time and try to figure that out. The danger point here, of course, is that the default parent slash mother slash runner of holiday magic often becomes the touchpoint person of, well, what would Blaba like?

15:44How about miss me with this question? Do you then still become the person who is technically buying all of the presents? Right. Once I send you an Amazon link, I should have just bought it myself. Right. Exactly. And you give away the one idea you had in my case. Fine. Yes, they want this. But I think these are all things that you can express to your family. You can say like, hey, you know, I do all the gift giving and I would like this. And earlier the better. You know what I mean? I'm a terrible last minute Christmas shopper and it gets much more expensive because I'm the person who's like, get Aunt Jane a microwave oven.

16:19I don't know. I don't care. It's$150. It's worth it to cross her off my list. So we went to our Facebook group, our beloved Facebook group, which you can always find at facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash what for shellcast. And we asked our listeners for some holiday hacks. These are generally Thanksgiving holiday hacks. The next thing on our list. Let's talk about, do you cook Thanksgiving dinner, Amy? I have done. I am not this year. This year we had the choice. We've had the choice the last several years to go to this sister-in-law and brother-in-law's house or that one. This side of the family or that side of the family.

16:57And we tend to just switch hit. We're very lucky that way. How about you? I am doing Thanksgiving this year at my house. Funnily, when we go to my in-laws in Texas, often people host Thanksgiving at my house when I'm not here because my brother and his wife have kids who live on the East Coast and my dad lives here. Even if we're out of town, someone hosts Thanksgiving at my house. I just leave the doors unlocked. They come in, host Thanksgiving and leave. This year, I'm going to be here. I have a lot of cooks. I don't do a ton of the cooking. I have one dish. I got my stuffing that I make. I love Thanksgiving.

17:35I like it so much better than Christmas. No gifts, really not a lot of prep. It's just one big meal. And I love a bunch of people cooking together and then a big meal that everyone enjoys. Like it's my best day. I love Thanksgiving. Do you have any stuffing tips? Why is stuffing your clutch dish? My mother makes a delicious stuffing. My mother's dead now, but she used to make a delicious stuffing. And now we have the recipe and it is cornbread, sausage, heavy cream, sherry, of course. And then I can't remember what this is. It's thyme or sage in it. It's just sweet. I mean, I could eat pounds of it.

18:14Like it calls to me from the fridge at night. It's you got to get the most sugary cornbread and then the sausage is really salty and it just hits that umami place that just is mind blowing. And no, I will not be posting the recipe. It's my mother's and you can't have it. I was going to say, put it in the newsletter. Amy, I might slip it to you. I might slip it to you, but I'm not putting it in the newsletter. I'm sorry, people. It's too valuable. I love stuffing. I think stuffing is my favorite. Like it's the reason for the season as far as I'm concerned. If you don't have it, I mean, I never make stuffing any other time, but it's so good.

18:45It's the best. And then... It's just salty bread. It's the best. It's salty, in my case, sugary bread. I mean, it's the perfect food. Sure. We are turkey deep fryers too, which is really fun. My son and my husband are the turkey deep fry team. Let me tell you, if you haven't had a deep fried turkey, it's delicious. We used to do a deep fried turkey and then a regular turkey because people were freaked out by deep fried turkey. And then like after the third year that nobody touched the regular turkey, we now just do two deep fried turkeys. I had it once and I didn't really get it, but I think it might have been.

19:18If you don't, if you didn't get it, I'm going to tell you it wasn't done correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Deep fried turkey was sort of delivered to us and then we had dinner an hour later and then maybe that was it. Does it need to be like, no, you cook it in advance. So it's not that it needs to be hot. I don't know. It was completely mediocre. Yeah. So what do you like and flavorful. I don't know. It's delicious. It doesn't, I feel like turkey often is the weird dry part that you have to get through to get the good stuff and you have to load all this stuff on top. To eat the stuffing. Deep fried turkey to me, it's like you could just eat a piece of it by itself, which regular turkey, if you try to picture doing that, it's like, why don't I just eat a handful of sawdust?

19:57I'm looking at the suggestions that the listeners gave us and Leora was saying that we were saying before, but she's making it a rule and I don't think it should be a rule. Leora says that in her family there's the every other year rule. if there's a tradition or gathering that maybe some people in your family want to do and some don't or nobody in your family wants to do, you participate every other year. And on the off years, you enjoy a low key Thanksgiving, just you or start a different tradition. You can make it every other year. I think and just be upfront about it. This is what we were saying about the discussion.

20:24We had a lot of people write in about how it works, what the location is. Mary says, as her generation of the family got older and older, they decided on a Christmas New Year tradition. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day left open for at-home private family celebrations and in-laws visits. And they choose another day in December or January to celebrate with the other side. Now, this is dangerously close to Martin Luther King. I know, M-L-K-X-M-A-S, yeah. Christmas. But I think, I mean, a lot of the trouble starts because people are annoying, let's be clear. And like, they're very territorial. My cousin has a joke that he drives down the street past a house he has not lived in for 40 years at Christmas time.

21:08And he yells out the window, that's not where the Christmas tree goes. Because the people have the Christmas tree in his old house in the wrong room. You know, the house he grew up in. I do think holidays bring out, this is how it has to be or else. And you know what else they bring up? I'm thinking of Gretchen Rubin said once to sort of question the rules you have for yourself. Like, I don't have time to read. I wish I have time to read books and I don't. Maybe that was true when your kids were three and one, but now they're 12 and 10 and you can start reading books again if you want to. I think sometimes we have rules.

21:37No, no, no, no. We can't travel at Thanksgiving because the kids are little or we must travel at Thanksgiving because my mom always hosts that these rules that made sense 10, 20, 40 years ago can change. You can adapt what's happening to the new situation in front of you. And it's like, this is just how it is. My sister always cooks and we have to go every year. Well, not if your needs have changed. And you can have conversations with people. I think the pre-meeting with your spouse and kids, then you go into the bigger meetings with this is what works for us this year. How can we make something work that's 50-50 between both of our needs or whatever it is?

22:16Now, a lot of you are going to have people on the other side who are like, take the knife out of the Christmas ham and just stab me if you're not going to come. You know, that's Olivia Soprano quote, for those of you who don't know. But there are not going to be people. I'm not saying that when you sit down and have these conversations, people are going to be like, Amy, amazing point. Thanks so much for bringing that up. Now I see that we all have different needs. No, people are going to be like, you have ruined everything through your selfishness. But if you pre-plan and you know all the moving pieces and you're saying like, I can hear how disappointed you are, we're going to alternate.

22:50We'll be there next year, but this year, this is what we're doing. I'm so sorry you're disappointed. I can't wait to celebrate next year. You're just holding your line and being clear on what works. Also, Anna says, which I kind of love this, our extended family gatherings currently take place in the community room of the senior home where my husband's grandfather lives. It's fantastic. Everyone in the family knows what to bring. Paper plates, no one cleans. Grandma pays for the meat. Husband cooks. I do nothing. but finding the joy in what is you always say the pain is in the gap and I think at the holidays sometimes well if we can't all be together there's no point in celebrating I'm not even going to eat a Christmas meal or a turkey meal for Thanksgiving okay I mean I guess you can choose that path but the joy of everyone gathering at the seniors home you can feel it in this text it's just lean in to the joy of it if you can.

23:50It feels amazing to me. Dana's coming in really hot with something that I happen to really agree with, but I never thought to take such a strong stance on it before. She says, basting does nothing but let the heat out of your oven and extend your cooking time. Remember, if you're looking, you're not cooking. Oh, I love a rhyme. You love a rhyme. You're all in. You're never basting again because it's rhymes and you're all in. I needed a rhyme for this It's because my husband and some, you know, other people that I know in my life leave the oven like, oh, let me see if the sweet potatoes are done.

24:24Open the oven door, meander over to the drawer where you keep the oven mitts, meander back to the oven, put the mitt on. Like now the oven door has been open for 60 seconds. I've tried to have this conversation with my husband a couple of times. Like, I know it says 350 on the little sign, but it's not magical. Like it was 350. Right. Well, the door was shut. When you leave the door open for five minutes, it's no longer at 350. Now that the door's been open, now it's 150. Right. Like, if you're going to open it, you have to open it really quickly. It doesn't magically go back to 350. And I don't think he really believes me.

24:54So I'm going to come in with Dana. Remember, if you're looking, you're not cooking. Oh, wow. You're going to be a menace at the holidays. I'm going to be all over it. All over that. You're going to be popping up. If you're looking, you're not cooking. Fernanda. When Amy announces her Christmas divorce, we will know that she said, if you're looking, you're not cooking one too many times. I want an apron that says that. But I'm going to take the other side of it a little bit. No, there's no other side. I mean, if you're looking, you're not cooking. I'm fine with it. But also, I feel like we could do a whole nother episode on holiday hills to die on.