Improving Holiday Family Celebrations

November 26, 2009

Interview with Herbert Rappaport PhD, author of the book The Family Gathering Survival Plan

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Mike Carruthers:
Going home for the holidays… as great as it sounds, holiday celebrations with family can be trouble.

Herbert Rappaport, PhD:
There's a sibling that makes a comment, there's an uncle who's going to be critical at the way somebody from the next generation is doing their Thanksgiving dinner, there's somebody who maybe drinks too much.
 

 
Dr. Herbert Rappaport, author of the book The Family Gathering Survival Plan …

The thing that I find most intriguing about what happens in families around holidays is that the same thing tends to happen year after year, so it accumulates.

It doesn't have to be that way if someone takes the initiative to fix the problem, but timing is everything.

I definitely think that the time to not try to fix things is at the celebration itself. So, the time to make changes is in-between holidays. I'm thinking of one particular patient that I work with who was really trying to bring an air of celebration to his Thanksgiving dinners and what this guy wanted to do was read a little poetry or a little prayer and he kept getting made fun of. And I encouraged him to not wait until the week before the holiday but actually sit down and have a very serious conversation with his older sister and everybody seemed to come out feeling pretty good about it.

And although it might seem scary to be the one to try to make things better at a holiday celebration, Dr. Rappaport says when you do, something wonderful usually happens.

When one person stands up and voices a complaint, there's usually several other people that say, "Thank heavens somebody did this." - they've been wanting to do this for years.