This time of year always puts me in a weird spot. On one hand, I genuinely enjoy the holidays as a chance to slow down, spend time with the people I care about, and eat a little more food than my calorie tracker would approve of. On the other hand, I have absolutely zero desire to travel north during the holiday season ever again. Cold, snow, crowds, airports that look like scenes from a disaster movie, and slick roads full of drivers who should've stayed home. No thanks. Anyone who wants to come visit me in sunny southwest Florida is welcome, but I'm not boarding a plane into a blizzard so I can freeze. I left that life behind for a reason.

I learned this the hard way years ago after one too many holiday trips involved delayed flights, lost luggage, and watching exhausted parents drag screaming kids across an airport carpet that probably still smells like cigarette smoke from the days when everyone lit up in the terminals back in the 1980s. That was the moment I realized I'd earned the right to say, yeah, I'm done with this. I'm 53 years old now. I've earned the right to "nope" out of having to travel for the holidays. Now I enjoy them from my own ZIP code, where the only white stuff on the ground is the sand on the beach.

The funny thing is, I actually like the spirit of the holidays. I like getting together, sharing a meal, laughing, and catching up. I love when Michael Buble finally emerges from his cave after Thanksgiving and starts crooning everywhere you go. I even enjoy the whole Mariah Carey All I Want for Christmas is You phenomenon (1). I watch A Christmas Story on its 24 hour loop on TBS every year, and Elf still cracks me up no matter how many times I see it. Yes, Die Hard counts. You know I'm right.

I also love Christmas lights. I just went out last night and programmed my exterior lights for red and green. I am not climbing a ladder and stringing lights around the house anymore, but a few years ago I put in color-changing LED lights, so now all I have to do is tell Alexa what to do and the whole house switches into holiday mode. I love simple tech magic like that.

What I don't like is the invisible price tag attached to all of it. Somewhere along the line, gift-giving turned into an obligation marathon. You show up to a family event, half the people are relatives you barely recognize, and suddenly you're handed a present from a third cousin you haven't seen since the first Bush administration. Now you're standing there smiling awkwardly, thinking great, I didn't get you anything because I didn't know you still existed. Meanwhile people go into debt buying stuff no one needs (or likely wants) so they can spend the next eleven months paying off a credit card bill that looks like a ransom note.

When my kids were little and my grandparents were still alive, the holiday expectations were insane. We were supposed to hit my mom's house, my dad's house, one grandma's house, the other grandma's house, my then-wife's parents' house, and then one of her grandmas, too. All in the span of two or three days. Picture two exhausted adults dragging two cranky kids in car seats through snow and ice (uphill, both ways, with no shoes) just so everyone could get their allotted fifteen minutes of "you didn't come see me" time. At some point you have to stop and ask who this is actually for, because it's definitely not the kids.

If you're stuck in that kind of endless loop, the only real way out is to start setting expectations and saying no. That might sound harsh, but it doesn't have to be. You can say things like, "We'd love to see everyone, but we're doing one stop this year. If you want to join us there, great." Or, "Traveling with little ones in winter just isn't working for us anymore, so we're staying home. You're welcome to come over if you'd like." You do not owe anyone a multi-city tour just because that's how it has always been done. A big part of a low-chaos holiday is deciding what's actually reasonable for your family and politely opting out of the rest.

Sometimes people worry that saying no will get them labeled as the difficult one in the family. Rush had a line in Subdivisions about conforming or being cast out, and it fits here. You shouldn't feel pressured to follow every tradition or expectation just to avoid disappointing someone. If your family cares about you, skipping one snowy trip isn't going to exile you from the clan. Life goes on. Holidays come every year. The people who matter will still want you around, even if you stop doing the grand tour of every living relative in a 50-mile radius. Real life isn't a high school cafeteria. Your family won't cast you out for choosing sanity over chaos.

Now, switching gears back to the over-commercialization of Christmas... as a business owner, I see both sides of the commercial frenzy. I run my annual Holiday Sale (2) every year because it keeps the lights on and the puppies fed. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? But even I roll my eyes at videos of people stampeding into stores like they're storming the gates of Mordor. I posted a Klingon Black Friday joke the other day that honestly wasn't far off from reality. It's capitalism at full power, and everyone acts shocked every year when it goes exactly the same way. Actually it seems to be subsiding somewhat from the days of glorious Walmart battle since more and more people are shopping online now. But back in the 90s... watch out!

Holiday expectations spill into the tech world too. Anyone who's worked IT support in December knows the chaos of someone needing their new laptop fixed right now so they can finish online shopping. Software developers spend the month juggling real work with rush jobs labeled emergency because the holiday newsletter suddenly became life-or-death. I've had consulting clients put off major Access updates until the very last minute and then ask if it can be done before the 24th. It's the holiday edition of scope creep, just with more blinking lights.

On the philosophical side, I've always found it interesting how many winter holidays are built on top of older traditions. Most modern celebrations were borrowed, repurposed, and rebranded across centuries. People today act like the traditions appeared out of thin air, but ancient cultures were already doing solstice festivals long before any modern faiths entered the picture. That's not an attack on anyone's beliefs. It's just history. We didn't suddenly invent the idea of cookies and candles in 1952. I try to keep things gentle here because a lot of my students care deeply about their faith, and I don't want anyone to feel unwelcome. I just prefer focusing on the parts of the season that bring people together instead of the parts that get used as boundary lines.

And then there's the yearly War on Christmas stuff. I've even gotten emails from people complaining that I said "happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas in one of my videos. I'm not waging war on anything. I don't even wage war on my laundry. I use happy holidays because there really are multiple holidays this time of year, and it's a simple way to include everyone. If someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I say "Merry Christmas" right back. It's not hard to be polite. The idea that acknowledging other traditions somehow weakens your own is one of those strange culture-war ideas that's never made much sense to me.

On the fitness side, this season is where people toss their nutrition and promise to fix it in January. I'm not a fan of that mindset. I enjoy the holiday meal, sure, but the rest of the week stays normal. One good dinner doesn't wreck anything. A month of grazing like a bored raccoon will. Case in point: our Thanksgiving this year. My wife and I went to a local restaurant that does a fantastic buffet, and I let myself enjoy it. I ate what I wanted, and yes, I even had sugary desserts and a slice of pumpkin pie. You have to do that once in a while. You can't live your life 100% strict. The next morning the scale did jump up a couple of pounds, but that stuff is almost always temporary. It's salt, water retention, the usual nonsense your body does after a big meal. And sure enough, after a day or two the scale came right back down to normal. One holiday feast is not going to derail your fitness progress, and it does a lot less damage to your health than the stress people put on themselves trying to be perfect this time of year.

In the end, I celebrate the holidays the way that keeps me sane. Warm weather, minimal travel, good food, actual friends, and as little forced consumerism as possible. I like the parts that feel genuine and human. The rest of it, people can keep. And if you ever want to visit me in December, bring shorts, not a snow shovel. The only thing we salt down here is our Margaritas.

LLAP
RR

(1) Funny story. When my friend Mitch and I used to go out to have a few drinks, we would play that song on the TouchTunes in the bar right before we left, any time of year. It could be the middle of July, and we'd play that just to see all the people in the bar go, "What!? Who played this?"

(2) I'd say "shameless plug" but I plug with full shame. I know what I'm doing.