I don’t want to cheapen your holiday celebration by having you obsess about how much it’s going to set you back on the scale. You’ve already heard me talk all month about choosing your outcomes, balancing your indulgences, and being ready for a new year come January.
Today I simply want to remind you what it really feels like to celebrate. This is a different breed of healthy holiday celebrations that I’m talking about– emotionally healthy holiday celebrations. Whether you celebrate a traditional Christmas, Hanukah, or other mix of holidays this season, I love how so many of the traditions pull from similar stories. Most formal Christmas traditions, for example, pull from medieval European countries celebrating the “yuletide” by painting their homes in light during the darkest, bitterest part of the season to remind themselves that light and life would once again come around the corner.
Having spent most of this season in southeast Alaska, I can certainly relate to that physical craving for light and the psychological desires it stirs up. (Though we’re fortunate in this part of the state to still enjoy six hours of meager daylight—unlike Barrow, which gets none.)
These ancient festivities all included large amounts of food and drink, which were a welcome break from the austere diet and tedious lifestyle they had been following for months prior. (Earliest Roman observances of December 25th involved savage revelry including human sacrifice and wild promiscuity—thankfully the evolution of the religions that eventually commandeered the holiday eventually made these parties more family-friendly.)
And, like most things in life, landing in that middle ground comes to be so important. The amount of pleasure we derive from food and drink is most often tied first to its otherwise scarcity, and secondly to the communal context in which it is enjoyed.
Hope you don’t mind a little foray into deeper sentiments today. As a personal fitness trainer with a degree in philosophy and religious studies, I wanted to mark the holidays with something a tad more meaningful than, “Lay off the eggnog.”
Which, by the way, I intend to enjoy this holiday week. With a splash of rum. Happy Holidays!
