Catherine Vandament, LMSW
In 2008, actors Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn co-starred in the holiday rom-com Four Christmases as couple Brad and Kate. As the movie unfolds, Brad and Kate’s travel plans are disrupted, leaving them to spend Christmas day visiting both of their divorced sets of parents and having four Christmases.
As a military spouse, this storyline resonated with me in a way I never saw coming. At first, I could not figure out why it felt so familiar until I did the math. Almost every year for ten years, my spouse and I traveled back to our home state of Texas but also traveled nearly 200 miles within the Dallas- Fort Worth metroplex in 24 hours to see all the family – four different Christmases. Y’all, no wonder I was exhausted from our time on leave each year. We spent so much time in airports and driving that we rarely stopped to be in the moment. This is also why we began to feel resentful of the holidays.
That is until 2017 when my then-six-year-old looked at me and said, “Mom, why do we not wake up in our house on Christmas morning.” I realized that day that four Christmases had caused me to fail to protect the child-like innocence and magic of Christmas for my child. Something had to change.
Our problem came down to two things: expectations and boundaries.
As a young military spouse, I felt I was expected to please everyone at any cost. In hindsight, I feel like I didn’t know any better. Keeping everyone happy was the goal, often at the expense of our well-being.
Let me see if these expectations sound familiar to you, dear reader. Are you the only one who lives out of state from your family? The only one that does or does not have kids to pack up and travel across the country? Are you the only sibling that is married? Do you live ‘close enough’ to drive to be there? Are you the one who is expected to travel every holiday season? These are all expectations you may or may not realize you are indulging, just like my family did.
There is hope, friend; these expectations can be brought into the light.
Expectations, whether expressed or implied, will often seem beyond our reach, so let’s talk about how we can regain a sense of ownership. As a clinician, one of the important pieces of work I do with clients is aiding them in cultivating healthy boundaries. Boundaries are a mechanism to help preserve our mental and emotional well-being, and they will look and sound different for each individual and family. For our family, we decided on a 3-year rotation to help curb the external stress brought on by the holiday season. We have one year where we do not travel to visit family, but we encourage them to visit us wherever we are in the world. In years two and three, one is spent with my husband’s family and the other with my family. This way, everyone gets quality time, and we don’t feel so scattered and exhausted by the end. In doing this, we ended over a decade of holiday fatigue.
Your boundary may be more or less complex than travel plans like my family’s. It may be a financial boundary that you need to create by setting limits with your family on how much and who you spend money on during the holidays. Or it could be understanding your non-negotiables when it comes to hot-button topics of conversation.
The holidays are, without a doubt, a stressful time of the year. It is exhausting from the financial balancing act to kids on winter vacation to organizing schedules and planning the ins and outs of holiday travel. And much of that happens before the holidays even begin.
Set healthy boundaries, no matter how big or how small. Will they be challenging to maintain? Probably in the beginning. Will they generate uncomfortable conversations with family? Perhaps. Will it take a bit of adjustment for you and your family? Yes. When it is all said and done, healthy boundaries yield healthy expectations for everyone.
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Catherine Vandament is a seasoned military spouse, mom of two, adoption advocate, public speaker, and infertility warrior. She graduated with her Master of Social Work degree from the University of Central Florida in 2023 and holds a Bachelor of Science in Education from Kansas State University. Catherine’s dedication to creating compassionate spaces that foster vulnerability in the military community makes her a two-time Armed Forces Insurance Military Spouse of the Year, representing Scott Air Force Base (2019) and Fairchild Air Force Base (2018).