The holiday season

This week we enter the major holiday season. We have four major holidays: Hanukkah, Yule (Winter Solstice), Christmas, and Kwanzaa. Just a few days after that we are off celebrating the new calendar year and we are off on another torrid pace in our lives. Stress seems to get a lot of many of us during this time of year. Weather it is trying to find the perfect gift for a loved one, being crazy enough to join everyone else in the malls or just dealing with holiday travel plans, we all have to deal with it on some level. Most of us are celebrating just one of these holidays, but there are many families that celebrate more than one. My family is one of these. We celebrate the changing of the seasons for Yule, where we welcome the light back from the darkest hour (ie, longest night of the year) and encourage the sun to gain strength each day until we reach the springtime. We exchange gifts, but we are trying to set a tradition of these being gifts that can be used for rituals or something that is made from scratch and has heart put into it. When it comes down to it we try to be simple folks who love nature and believe in the power of it. After we have had our peaceful celebration, we then get ready for Santa to come and celebrate the Christmas holiday with the rest of the family. While I'd love to say we keep it simple here, I realize that we do our job in trying to aid the local economy too and tend to get caught up in the festivities. This week we've been having issues with the children as they are overcome with the excitement that is ahead and are nearly at our wits end, trying to enjoy the holidays but not let things get too out of hand. My observation with how other children are this time of year, I am not feeling left out, but I do feel the stressors of the season building up. My question is how to people find a way to maintain control of the stress while enjoying the holiday so that traditions and new memories can be made? I can't wait to enjoy the time with my family this season. It is my second season out of the snow and it feels strange, but we are making our new traditions and having new experiences all the time.