To feel totally overwhelmed by all the ‘occasions’

[Liverpoolgirl50]

Christmas Eve boxes, Easter bunny presents, ‘boo baskets’, pumpkin picking, Halloween light trails, cake smashes, birthday parties. Jesus it’s like I can’t breathe sometimes.

I swear it’s getting worse too. Every time I go on social media there’s something new. Christmas toy workshops, Halloween kiddy afternoon tea, meet Santa at breakfast, teddy bear picnics at the garden centre, the polar express! I feel totally utterly overwhelmed by it all sometimes.

We are lucky that we can afford to treat our DD but where is the cut off and how much of this stuff is normal and expected now? I’m thankful we only have 1! FWIW, she’s only 2 so we can get away with doing minimal stuff at the moment but are kids going to grow up expecting it?

As a kid we got one Easter egg and were happy 😂

But it's a lot more pressure when your peers are also doing it!

The more ‘occasions’ you do, the less they stand out and the more blase your kids are.

Do whatever would make you really excited and happy, it’s the excitement you generate they will appreciate and remember. There’s such a lot you could do, just do the ones you find really attractive and you will probably be able to maintain those as rituals for years. Kids love predictable rituals.

It’s just commercialism of everyday life. Be you, Do what you think benefits your family.

Leave the rest. Your child will benefit far more from your time, love and being outdoors. Then all this stuff and experience. But I do understand what you mean and I hate it too.

isnt all that stuff the majority of families do?

I don’t know anyone who does any of those things. Families I know do birthday parties, Carol services, maybe a Santa visit or a light trail, do National Trust seasonal things. Definitely not “boxes”, never a cake smash - they’re so awful.

But I see all the mass consumer things as more, I guess, lower class. I don’t really know anyone who follows influencers or posts a lot on social media either. My friends and I wouldn’t do the various boxes and plastic buying as we can see they’re just a way to part people from their money - they don’t add anything to a child’s life, in the same way that a fun, once in a while experience would.

Just echoing what other posters have said about picking and choosing what works for you, in my experience though kids don't like to have their free time jam packed with activities; they need down time too. I think it helps to think whether you'd genuinely enjoy something as a family or whether you're just doing something because you feel you should.

Another thing is you can spend a fortune on trying to create core memories for your kids and the special moments they remember will be something completely different and random like the time you fell over in McDonald's on Christmas Eve or the time you let them have two selection boxes. Every year we drive to an estate near us that has particularly good lights, the kids then decide it's so good they have to show their dad so we go back again a second time with their dad. For some reason the second drive back is the kid's favourite thing to do every year.

I am a bit of a hypocrite though because I was shoehorned into doing that bloody elf. I just couldn't find a way to explain to my eldest why Santa was sending everyone else a funny magical elf but not him (because you don't need an elf to check you're behaving didn't cut it). So if you're going to avoid that, be prepared with a reason why!

@ohfook I know a mother who told her kids the elf only comes to check on bold kids, and her kids had behaved well all year so santa didn't need to send an elf 😅

I agree the pressure is real though. We have held firm on picking the traditions and occasions we celebrate to date, but my 6 year old son came home from school on Valentine's this year in floods of tears because everyone in his class had received gifts for Valentine's from their family, teddies and flowers and he had nothing and he had interpreted that as meaning nobody loved him 😓He is a sensitive little soul so next year I plan to buy him a small teddy or chocolate lollypop to put out at breakfast, despite the fact that his dad and I don't even celebrate Valentine's or exchange cards and gifts ourselves!

We don't do elf on the shelf and my 9 year old daughter also constantly asks and gets a bit disappointed every year about why no elves come to play at our house. Whilst I'm definitely not starting that tradition, it's exhausting constantly explaining why we don't do something and saying no and the whole madness irritates me.

Boo Box.
Blimey. Every day’s a school day on mumsnet.

I promise that the only thing on your list we did was birthday parties. Luckily, our friends were similar so there was no social pressure. Get new friends?!

Never heard of a boo basket!!

Ultimately you decide what you do or don't do -

Halloween - Trick or treating with an empty box - don't need the other Halloween stuff - most kids are used to and very happy with

Christmas - I've never done a Christmas Eve box or any of that stuff, we have Christmas Day, we see Santa once at 'something', could be an event if I feel extravagant, could be a shopping mall

Easter - I don't really do anything

Birthdays - go to the ones which your child is invited to, do what suits you for your child's birthday. Some people enjoy a big class party, others like family and friends at home

There's no right or wrong really

I can really relate to this op. My ds is coming up to 5, just started reception. I'm not even on much social media but I notice how many "things" there are now. Like you say, it's not just the occasion itself, like Christmas and Easter, Halloween etc it's the "occasion leading up to the occasion" 🤯🤣

My advice is just do what suits you. Our ds doesn't really like busy, bustling places so it naturally lets us off the hook for some stuff. He also has a birthday 2 weeks before Christmas so things in Dec can be a bit tight!

But he doesn't miss out. We did trick or treating with him and his neighbour friend for the first time last year and they loved that. He did a pumpkin with my parents and we took it the local Halloween "spooky" walk in the park , which was free. We watch a firework display from a distance because he doesn't like the noise up close. We put on a little egg hunt this year for him and a couple of his nursery friends, just in the garden with a pack of little Asda eggs to find and some biscuits to decorate - they were buzzing and it saved us ££ on the big stately home type egg hunts.

We don't do a Christmas eve box, but we put the tree up the first weekend of Dec and get the family "Christmas box" out which is the decorations, jumpers, advent calendars (just standard ones with little chocolates in) and the Christmas books which we've added to each year. We go around the villages looking at the lights and he "meets Santa" at the local church for about £5. We've done "bigger" things some years but it's so expensive and can be overwhelming.

Some families love all the big "extra" stuff and that's great if it works for them.

Others almost do a competition to see who can be the most "above it all" with the oh my kids get one tiny egg and some puzzles in a stocking and everything else gets donated because "plastic tat" and "consumerism" or they'll pretend not to know what a Christmas eve box is even though they've been around for about 20 years. To be honest that makes me eye roll a bit because it can sound a tad joyless - but I try to check myself for being judgy because everyone has different set ups and values don't they, so it's just whatever works really.

This is so true. Pushed by ever growing commercialism and FOMO. It’s also a way to beat the boring humdrum of life and wanting everything to be exciting.

OP YANBU and it’s probably time to take a break from social media.

We don't do any of this shite.

We do:
Bonfire night (fireworks event at a sports club).
Sometimes trick or treat on neighbouring roads
Presents @ birthday
Stocking @ present on christmas day

Most of our little traditions as a family are free/cheap. Baking & decorating christmas biscuits, playing Christmas music and singing carols, making toffee for bonfire night, burning letters to father christmas on the fire.

We have plenty of money but I don't want to raise my kids to only appreciate costly, commercial ticketed events.

Keep it simple for as long as possible! At two years old, they don’t need any of that stuff. You will burn yourself out if you try to do it all, as the options will only broaden as they get older. Stick to what you actually enjoy and bin the rest. Ignore social media, ignore what other people are doing, and “keep your eyes on your own painting.”

For our family, each year is a bit different according to what sort of bandwidth we have, and we’ve also had to learn what our limits are as we’ve gone along. For one or two years, our Christmas season was miserably jam-packed, so we learned to say no to booking any ‘magical’ activities and events in advance as those often ended up being just one more thing on our plate to get done instead of something really enjoyable. We wait now and only go and do those kinds of things if we feel like it in the moment.

We do have traditions that we keep every year, but those are things that we all enjoy and find life-giving. We attend our village Christmas market on opening night. We go and chop our own tree. We observe advent. We attend the children’s Christmas concerts and performances. We bake some cookies if we feel like it. We attend the Christmas Eve service at church. We go to the mountains and ski in the second week of the Christmas holidays. I’m really thankful that we never started things like Elf on the Shelf for Christmas Eve boxes or Santa visits or light tours. There is plenty to enjoy without all of that extra stuff! Too much activity can make what would otherwise be a lovely season absolutely miserable.

Round about this time of year as summer fades I like to remember peak primary performative social media.

We rock up at local woodland dog walk area, been there a million times, my kids are wearing Wellingtons and random weekend clothes they've pulled on. The dog immediately jumps in the stream and then on us.

We spot local mum from a competitive little friendship group, in the carpark shouting at her three immaculately dressed children about why they have to wear this, carry that, all wear a hat. She's lototally lost the plot and everyone was crying.

We set off, dog walked, by the time we return their car is gone.

That evening, the most beautiful, quite filtered set of photos appear of them throwing leaves in the air, about 20 metres from the car park. Red cheeked.
Occasionally, she reposts them, a memory of a five minute photo shoot, not part of a longer walk, a heavily curated, totally about a manufactured making memories moment.
I'd love to hear how she feels about it, but have never been brave enough.

It does all settled down. Stay strong and confident!

I also think it's worth remembering that some people enjoy doing all this nobody is right or wrong.

It's not for me, and my kids need a lot of downtime, so I don't do it. I have a friend that does boo boxes, has a Halloween tree, a different door wreath every season, ghost walks, light trails, first period box the whole shebang. She bloody loves it - for her it's not pressure but a form of enjoyment. Everyone's just figuring out what works for them.

This summer I was at the beach and watched an older kid, maybe about age 9 or 10, spend about ten minutes photographing presumably his mum, in a beautiful floral dress, and a toddler run hand in hand down the sand dune over and over again.

One they'd got the right photo, all the beach gear was packed back up again and off they went. I always call bullshit when I hear stories like this on MN and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

I suspect the real issue here is not what people are doing with their children, but how social media works to commercialise this stuff and pressurise parents into thinking it's all necessary.

Just don't buy into it. You just feed the machine. As you said you had 1 easter egg and were happy.

There are so many Christmas activities and holidays on offer everywhere just for Xmas alone. such as Lapland holidays, Centre parcs holidays, theme parks, Santa visits etc.

Tiring commercial bollocks, all of it. I’m dreading Christmas.

Considering getting on a plane and leaving everyone to it.

I'm a lot older than most of you so we didn't do all these american ideas.
Christmas - paper advent calendar ()me
" Chocolate advent calendar (kids)
Easter book and one Easter egg (me)
"2 Easter eggs (kids)
Halloween, spells (me) for example peeling and apple in one strip and throwing it over your left shoulder to see the initial of your true love.
Halloween party at the rugby club (kids)
Bonfire night fireworks for us all.

December 1st basket - has all the mugs, plates etc that we use through December.
Christmas Eve box , a bath bomb to calm excited children down. So a very tiny box, actually a bag.😃

My DC are now early 20s. Christmas was paper advent calendars with nativity scene, a red pillow case of gifts each from Santa, one gift from us to them. Their favourite thing was when I put some cheap Christmas wrapping paper over the door to the living room and they had to burst through to see if ‘he’d been’. Easter was hi an egg plus an Easter bunny, my DM would do a hunt in her garden for little tiny eggs. Halloween was apple bobbing and trick or treat around the block. Bonfire night was hot dogs and pumpkin soup, sparklers in the garden and maybe a public display. Birthdays were a mixture of parties at home or soft play - chn only, not parents.