Hotter, More Loving Holidays

So often when a client is talking to me about the holidays and the stress that they're facing, the response that I have is there's a boundary that needs to be set here. There's a limit. There's I'm not going to do this, or I need you to not do that, or if this has to be this way, then here's how I'm going to respond. Just knowing what works well for you is hugely important and valuable. And I've heard it said recently that boundaries define how close you can be to somebody and still love yourself. You know, still be loving to yourself. Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease pleasure and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode seven, Paths to Hotter, More Loving Holidays. I asked my husband when we were in the hot tub together, what do you think we've learned that has helped us the most to have the kind of holidays that we really want to have? We've been celebrating holidays together for 24 years now, and only rarely have we gone. I remember one year we went to Winthrop, Washington, kind of the end of the road, a little cowboy town, and spent Christmas together there. Another time we spent Thanksgiving together there. These are both before we had kids. And there have been times when maybe my family came to Seattle for Christmas because my sister had a baby who was due, who miraculously actually came early enough that she was there for Christmas instead of being still in utero. But in general, we travel for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, or parents come to us, but we spend Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his or vice versa. And there's this beautiful orchestration with our extended family to make sure that all of our siblings get together, especially on my side, at least once a year. So that means that we spend a lot of time with a lot of other people for the holidays. And you may have that experience as well, that you spend time with your extended family. You may have kids whose needs you're really focused on for the holidays and making magic for Them, as I love to do with my children. And then the relationship can get to be kind of an afterthought. So because Kurt and I have really focused on this and learned a lot about how to make sure that our holidays are a magical time for us as a couple, as well as being this magical extended family extravaganza, I wanted to share some of those, and I really appreciated his contributions to this episode because I tend to be elaborate and he tends to be succinct, and so that was really helpful. So we're going to dive into the seven paths to hotter, more loving holidays so that you can implement, even if you put into place one, two, or three of these, a way of relating to your holidays that's more pleasurable, more intimate, and hopefully more peaceful, more nourishing, so that after the holiday, you feel energized and inspired and not depleted and in need of a vacation from your connections. So the seven paths include planning intentional celebrations, building pleasure into your plans, giving the gift of intimacy, prioritizing time alone together, simplifying your gift, giving, setting boundaries with love, and savoring stillness. I'm going to dive into each of those in turn. So here we go. First, plan intentional celebrations. This was one of the first things that we learned and one of the things Kurt brought up last night. Know what you're about before you go into it. So whenever we're going to visit either set of parents, and Kurt's dad passed away this last year, so it's just his mom now, and we're going to go see her for Thanksgiving, as at the time of this recording, it's before Thanksgiving, and we're going to go see my parents for Christmas. So before we leave, we always connect with each other and just ask, what's your intention for this trip? We try to boil it down to one word each of us, and those don't have to be the same word, but through the conversation, we come up with sort of a joint intention and a way of supporting each other in what we really want out of the time. There have been times when I really wanted to focus on connecting more deeply with my grandmother, or times when I wanted to just have fun with my sisters because I hadn't seen enough of them in the prior year. Certainly since we've had children, creating magic for them has been a part of the intention. So what is it for you? What is the intention of this trip? Who do you want to be? What's the touchstone you want to come back to in each of your many, many choices throughout the duration of the visit. And that brings up another point about intentionality. A rule of thumb I have learned is that four days is the sanity threshold for just about everybody being under the same roof with extended family, especially the family you grew up with. I don't know anybody who does really great through the four day mark. And honestly, it's on day four or day five, there's some sort of meltdown or mental health challenge for somebody because it's just a lot to be together if the visit really is longer than that. You know, we've been in palm Springs for seven days or 10 days with my whole family. And that can work. We just got to know that there's going to be an ugly day in the middle. And you can start to plan around that by taking say, a day trip that gives everybody a break from each other. As an example, maybe an overnight. And that's a beautiful design for a holiday. If you're spending five, six nights with extended family, if it's possible for the children to stay with your parents or your sister and brother in law or whatever, then you might get the double bonus of everybody getting a break from each other and you and your partner getting some time alone together. We've even done it where Kurt or I will go away just by ourselves in the middle of a trip. And I know that that's certainly for my family and maybe sounds to you like just blasphemous, you know that this is a time to be together. But those kinds of rules are what can be deadening. And what I'm after is aliveness. So if taking time away with just your partner or your partner and your kids, driving an hour away to a neat thing and spending the night there or taking the whole day there is something that's going to create more aliveness for everyone, then by all means you do that in the middle of the trip. And what we found is that people do understand, even if they don't understand, they cope with what you've chosen to do in your intentional design of the holiday. So absolutely worth a try. So once you've set your intention and you've let it guide your plan for the whole visit or connection, then do little check ins with your partner. Kurt and I usually like when we get back to wherever we're sleeping and we have some time alone together in the evening, we always do a little inventory of our day and what our wins were and what we're grateful for and things we'd do differently if we could. We do that wherever we are. But when we're on a family trip, we debrief with each other and we check in with how we're doing with our intention. So to really live out your intention, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of it and keep course correcting day by day. So that's number one plan intentional celebrations. The second path to hotter, more loving holidays is to build pleasure into your plans. So this involves all the senses. And you know me, if you've listened to the podcast for any amount of time, you know that I believe that pleasure is what fuels our best lives. And I mean erotic pleasure. I mean a connection to your sensual side, whether that's with another person or through pleasuring yourself. But build pleasure into your plans means that this holiday doesn't become entirely family oriented and neutering of your own erotic side. So I know you might be staying in your childhood bedroom or you might have a house full of people at your house. Whatever it is, it's very easy for sex to go on the back burner or fall off the back of the stove. But I invite you to look at where the pockets are where you might be able to create shared pleasure with your partner and keep yourself orgasm fueled so that you're at your best for the holiday. The other piece about building pleasure into your plans is really looking at what are the things that delight you the most about the season or the holiday. And I know that for me, when I was really into the food, for me, it was all about food and drink. And the holidays were a time to just take license to eat and drink and eat and drink all day long. And that actually wasn't that pleasurable in the aggregate because it meant that I was feeling bloated and stuffed and, you know, maybe had a mental fog from having Baileys in my coffee in the morning or champagne after dinner or whatever it was, it really didn't increase my pleasure. I can see in retrospect, I couldn't really see it at the time, but I encourage you to by all means follow your own values and what works best for your body, but really reflect on whether the choices that you're making to indulge your senses are truly pleasurable or whether they detract from your pleasure net net the way they did mine. So now I think in terms of enjoying my food and having beautiful food and environments and really feeding the senses. But I don't overindulge. And some of the pieces that I love to bring in are like, this year my mom was here and she and I And my daughter worked on some pomanders, the traditional ornaments where you take oranges and put cloves into them and roll them around in more spices. And we found orris root is this preservative herbal powder that helps them not get nasty. So just think about how you can indulge your senses with the scents and the sights and the touches. You know, do you like to go drive and look at the winter lights? Do you like to take a walk in the snow? You want to go get your own tree? What is it that helps you really celebrate the holidays that you celebrate? And what are the sensory delights of those? And how can you really be present to all those pleasures? So that's about building pleasure into your plans. And if there's a sex date that you can plan into the week, you know, perhaps supported by what we talked about in the first path, being intentional, if you can plan a time for the two of you to get some privacy so that you can have a delicious holiday Santa baby kind of moment together, then that's a great plan. So now let's move on to path three, give the gift of intimacy. And by that I mean in this season, we're often thinking about what presents am I going to buy? What physical objects will I give to other people? But if what you really want is a deeply meaningful, memorable, delicious holiday season, then you may want to think in terms of what are the truths that I can share with other people about what they mean to me and how I really feel about them and who I am? And what are the experiences that we can cultivate in our gift giving? Are there gifts I want to give that create experiences for us together or for them that maybe create a lighter footprint on the planet and allow them to become more or create new memories or draw us closer? And what are the things I really want to share with people? So writing letters and notes at the holidays and including those in gifts is really beautiful. And I don't mean that I send out 200 handwritten holiday cards. You know, those are a little bit more automated, but it's also a beautiful thing. And I can tend to when I get overwhelmed. I may have shared that I have ADD and there have been several years during my children's lifetimes when I haven't sent Christmas cards or holiday cards at all because it was too much for me. And I really get that if that's a place you run into. But what I'm talking about is just for dear ones, a short list of people that you're really close with. You might want to just say something to wrap up the year, to reflect on memories together, to reflect on what they mean to you. Especially this year. Having just lost my grandmother, who was so dear to me and such an important part of my childhood and my adulthood, I'm aware that I have always tried to. And it's still ways that I wish I had more, but I've always tried to be complete with each person. I lost my dad when I was 19, and I've been blessed to have another dad since I was 7 also. So if you hear me talk about my dad, who's still alive, there's that dad, Harry. But my dad, Rick, died of a brain tumor when I was 19. And so I know firsthand that you don't know how long you have with people and that we have to let them know what they mean to us every day, because you never know which time is the last time you're going to see someone. So that's the third path. Give the gift of intimacy takes us into more loving holidays. The fourth path is to prioritize time alone together. I've definitely mentioned this in the context of pleasure and in the context of intentionality, but this goes throughout the season in, you know, a lot of times, the weekends about this time of year start to get really busy with other people's holiday events. They're inviting us to. We've got lots of kids activities that are wrapping up. Kids school is wrapping up, and it just feels like this massive acceleration in December. And it's really easy to let time alone together get crowded out. So Kurt and I double down on it. Instead of letting it get crowded out, we emphasize it even more because we know that that's the recipe for sanity, for closeness, and for communicating. There's so many details in motion that we kind of need to kibitz on those in addition to feeling close or sensual with each other. So there's that time alone together does kind of triple duty. And that's one of the things that's really important for us when we're visiting family is making sure that we get time alone together. And so that sometimes looks like us running errands together. Okay, we're going to go out and get the groceries for everybody right now. Just the two of us or taking a walk together. One of the things when I asked Kurt, he was like, time physically outside is hugely important and valuable for us to enjoy the holidays optimally. And I think that's really true. And it's a magical time to be outside wherever you are on the planet. Whether it's summertime in your in Australia or, you know, we spend a lot of time this time of year in Alaska, where it's dark and cold and beautiful in that way, or here in Seattle, where it might be wet and green, Just tapping into nature alone together is really a beautiful part of this season. So the fifth pathway is simplifying gift giving. This helps us have more loving holidays because it reduces our stress, even in the procurement of gifts for extended family and friends. And it also reduces the stress of, like, receiving and causing others to receive too much stuff. So we've really looked at that and gotten intentional about what's the intention of giving gifts. And we focus on giving things that are simple, that are beautiful, that benefit other people. Heifer.org has long been one of the ways that we gift clients and friends and family will buy a whole cow or my in laws have bought an ark. And so, you know, you can spend dozens of dollars or hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars. And what heifer does is give animals to families in communities and then supports them with training and the initial feed for that animal so that they can create that gift that then they can pass on to others. So it's kind of like the micro loans that are so wonderful that allow the recipient to then be a donor in the future and teaches them to fish. So that's one kind of gift in kind that we can do to simplify gift giving. But other things include, there's so many nieces and nephews on my side of the family, and my sisters and brother and I all, you know, love each other's kids and love getting each other's kids stuff. And so we make sure that we have the opportunity to do that. But we've also, like, put a cap on it and said, like, one gift per family for each kid in the other families and for the adults. Instead of getting gifts for all my siblings and all their spouses and trying to figure out what that is and all that, we've decided to get one nice gift. And we were drawing names for a time. And then that gets kind of complicated because I have adult nieces and nephews, and different people have lots of different places where they might need to be on the holidays. So we don't necessarily know who's going to be able to be there on that day. So we're doing a round robin kind of gifting where we'll open things up and pass them around. And, you know, there's different names that people use for that kind of thing, but everybody's going to walk away with something nice, and we all get to be thoughtful and creative and share that part of ourselves with each other and keep it simple. So that's the recommendation there. Now, the sixth path is to set boundaries with love. And by that I mean that so often when a client is talking to me about the holidays and the stress that they're facing, the response that I have is there's a boundary that needs to be set here. There's a limit. There's I'm not going to do this, or I need you to not do that, or if this has to be this way, then here's how I'm going to respond. Just knowing what works well for you is hugely important and valuable. And I've heard it said recently that boundaries define how close you can be to somebody and still love yourself. You know, still be loving to yourself. So with different family members, that's going to be different. And setting limits on particular behavior, you know, letting somebody know, if you need to do this, that's totally fine. And here's what I'm going to do, if that's what you need to do, or saying, yeah, we're only going to stay for three days because I think we all do best with that length of visit. I know it would be nice to have more. And that doesn't tend to work out. So we're going to do three days and really enjoy each other. Another example is that in many families there will be a family member who, who drinks too much or begins to act out in other ways at some point in an event, and we don't have to storm out or create a big kerfuffle, but kind of anticipating some of that and having a plan B having approach that we're going to take, whether that's we're going to get out a game and go into this room and play the game as the evening wears on, or we're going to let people know that we're leaving. And at 8, whatever it is that lets you be clear on your boundaries and lets you stay in integrity, I mean it in the spinal sense. Like with all of your vertebra stacked on top of each other, you get to stay upright. You don't have to be bent over at the waist, you know, deeply uncomfortable holding a heavy tray. You can stand upright and let your bones hold the tray and put the tray down when it's time. So setting boundaries with love is the sixth path to hotter, more loving holidays. And then the final path that I've identified for right now anyway. The seventh path is to savor stillness. And this is really the sacred facet, what I think of as sensual, delicious optimal Holidays the stillness of the season is what comes to mind when I think about a walk on fresh fallen snow, or listening to the Carolina Silent Night or turning all the lights off except the lights on the tree and maybe some candles and just sitting in the quiet. I believe that the heart of the season is found in stillness and that that's something we can teach our children to savor and that it's really where the same way the little flakes in a snow globe will settle back down to the bottom after we shake it up if we just let it be still. The this is where all the blessings of togetherness and delicious food and beautiful packages and the thoughtful gifts wrapped inside them, they all come to land on our hearts and our souls inside stillness. So that can be quiet moments with or without music, with or without candlelight, with each other. And it's also crucial for me during the holidays to maintain my meditation practice. So even with everything else we're all doing, I make sure to get to bed on time so that I can get up early, so that before everybody else is up and running around and making noise and no matter how crowded a place I'm in, I've got some quiet with which to start the day. And for me that's listening to the divine. In my quiet time, I'm asking for guidance on who I am to be today, how I can show up what's mine to do and what's mine to release, what's none of my business. And that quiet time early in the day helps me stay more sane. I won't say stay sane, but saner throughout the day and present for the people I love. So savoring stillness is the seventh path. I invite you to walk with me along imperfectly, just adventuring so that we might have hotter, more loving holidays. I hope one or more of these are helpful to you and I would love to hear what it is that you've applied and how it worked. I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free Conscious couples circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences at Ask Questions and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society.lizenberry.com that link is in the show Notes for you. You know, new listeners need to hear what you're taking away, too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget, with just a few words about what this show gives you. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're going to want to, so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button, and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode, and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.