Microdosing the Holidays: Festive Cheer in Tolerable Doses

What are you skipping this year? What micro delights do you have?

Microdosing is all the rage these days.

While I can’t comment on the psychedelics, small doses of the holidays match my general sense of overwhelm. Big goals feel…well, too big. For everyone with limited energy (you?) large holiday projects demand too much. Meh to them.

You energetic people, I see and admire your color-coordinated decor, your gorgeous swaths of greenery and your homemade cookies. You go.

Over here, I’m micro-decorating for the holidays. I put out a few treasures – the number of things I know I’ll have the energy to put away later. With no kids at home, and quiet plans for Christmas, there’s no need for a tree this year. The deaths of family members feel weighty for me this year, and the quiet feels good.

My holiday example was a stressed mother who did it all, and was too tense to enjoy anything. In reaction, my Christmas plans are always scaled down, by American standards. I’m afraid of falling into the trap of doing too much and hating it all, while making everyone around me miserable. Some people are going big on Christmas this year. Lots of decorations went up right after the election. My impulse is less, as if to save my energy for a long winter.

My father’s toy fire truck, from his childhood, something he saved all his life and passed on. One of my beloved (few) holiday decorations.

The national news in the U.S. is also better in microdoses. There’s no need for big helpings of information about the pedophiles, sexual predators and grifters being nominated to serve in the next administration.

Anna De La Cruz delighted me recently with a word about microfeminism. We can expand the world with small choices. For example, choosing say “she” as the default for the firefighter, doctor, dentist or tree person, until we know otherwise. Our usual default is “he.” We can always switch to “she” or “they.” She’s also training her kids, boys and a girl, “to notice what needs to be done, not just wait to be asked to complete a specific task. “Look around. What do you see that needs to be done?” Typically, noticing is a job that belongs to women.

A dear friend is intentionally planning for small doses of joy this month, inspired by the inimitable Anne Lamott, who always reminds us that the small things are really the big things.

Silence is my other small practice this month. A few minutes a day, nothing too ambitious. Just enough to settle my spirit back into the season’s gift of peace. I’m also micro-gifting — I have fast food gift cards for the unhoused people I meet, so they can go inside and get warm.

How about you? What are you doing in small amounts this season? And where are you going big?

After I wrote about paper cards, a friend recommended Tiny and Snail. These are beautiful, unique cards, with original artwork, created by two women, and comparable in price to the card store.

The book I can’t put down: The First Advent in Palestine. Kelley Nikondeha sets the first Christmas into the first century world of an occupied country, and all of the ways the good news of Christmas subverts the dominant empire and lands on the side of ordinary people. Just in case that sounds familiar to you…