It’s that time of year again — the season when every organization, school, church, and family member needs something from you.

Sign-up sheets. Bake sales. Holiday parties. Gift exchanges. Volunteering. Hosting. And somehow you’re supposed to do all of it with a smile while also keeping your family fed and your sanity intact.

In this episode — my annual fan favorite — I give you full permission to say no.

We talk about:
* Why moms feel obligated to say yes to everything (and the real cost)
* How to say no without guilt, drama, or long explanations
* Which things actually matter this season (it’s fewer than you think)
* Protecting your peace so you can be present for what counts

If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
 How to Survive the Rest of May: A Catholic Mom Guide
 A No-Disappointment Christmas: Managing Holiday Expectations
 Less Stress for the Holidays

If you love this kind of straight talk — and want ongoing support for setting boundaries and building a calmer life — that’s exactly what we do inside Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order. Come join us at catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart

I do not like feeling pressured into doing things I do not enjoy. For example, one of the things we don’t do is we don’t put Christmas lights up. We live in the country in the middle of nowhere. We actually end up putting. Some white lights, I think downstairs for the kids, but we don’t do the climb on the roof thing and put all the lights up.

I have no thoughts about other people putting up lights or not putting up lights. This is just clearly an example for me where I do not feel the value in that activity. So we choose as a family not to do that. It’s really important that you sit down. And you think about intentionally where you want to put your time, your money, and here’s the kicker, your emotional effort into the holiday season. 

And I just wanna encourage all of you to take out a piece of paper and write down all the things. It’s a lot. A lot of you have girls in the Nutcracker, a lot of you have kids that are gonna do Christmas recitals. Some of you are gonna sign up for the nativity play. 

And then whether you homeschool your kids or send them to school, the kids will be home for some amount of break and there will be a lack of structure around Thanksgiving week and the week of Christmas and New Year’s. That’s coming. Then there are gifts, then there are office holiday parties. Then there’s chocolate everywhere. 

Part of managing your emotions is also deciding ahead of time when there is free, delicious food everywhere. Are you going to eat it? And this episode is not at all about telling you what you should or should not do, but showing you that you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to do anything. You get to decide. 

And I’m a big fan of doing this activity with my husband and sitting down and saying, Hey, what’s important to you? What do you think is kind of a waste of time? And we both do things over the holidays that individually may not be our favorite thing, but we’re doing it for each other and that’s totally fine.

For example, my husband loves having homemade cinnamon rolls, Christmas morning. It’s a big deal to him, and so having the kitchen be very, very clean before he does that is really important to him. And then it happens in a couple stages, and then he makes them on Christmas morning. That’s important to him.

I didn’t grow up eating cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, so that’s not as important to me, but it’s so important to him and I’m happy to do that for him. And then I’m the one who’s a little bit more into jammies or slippers or blankets, kind of those soft things for the holidays. And my husband’s like, I don’t get it. We have blankets. We have jammies. Why are, why do we need those things? 

And I’m like, I just enjoy it and I know that he wants to make me happy. And so usually we pick one of those things to give as a gift to the family every year. So I think it’s okay that there are compromises. I’m not saying you have to decide what you love and then don’t do anything else for other people.

But there’s a big difference between a genuine yes. I really wanna do this. This feels good to me. Versus, let’s say your sister wants to go to Zoo Lights and it’s at night and it’s cold and it’s expensive, and you know your kids are just gonna fuss and cry and they’re gonna want the $7 hot chocolate.

And you’re like, I don’t wanna give them the $7 hot chocolate, which is too hot anyway, by the way. And burns them and then they cry, and then they spill it. It’s a whole thing. And your sister wants to go, but you really just don’t, it doesn’t feel like a yes for you and your family and you love your sister so much. So you’re kind of just doing it out of guilt. 

But it’s not the same thing as cinnamon rolls for my husband, where I’m like, oh, that’s cute. That he likes that. I’m willing to, my part is cleaning the kitchen before the cinnamon rolls. ’cause he rolls them out like on our counter. So they have to be really, really clean. Versus the yucky feeling of, I should go to Zoo Lights for my sister. ’cause she really likes it. 

And really it’s a no, there’s more yuckiness than we want to love and serve this person. Like it’s really outside of your family values. And in this case, your family values would be something like, you know, putting the kids to bed on time, not being out in cold, wet, rainy places. Can you tell that maybe I’ve been to Zoo Lights in Portland, Oregon a few times. Which is magical and beautiful, by the way. I just don’t love doing it with little kids. 

Let your yes be yes. And your no, be no. There will be no bitterness this year. How do I know? ’cause you’re gonna decide ahead of time, all the things that you wanna do. You’re gonna just decide. 

And even if it’s something that’s not your favorite, but you’ve really decided in your heart you’re gonna do this thing for someone else, it’s a gift freely given. With love, then you’re not gonna be bitter about it. There’s lots of things we do over the holidays for other people, and that’s fine. We just don’t wanna do the ones that we don’t have a clean heart about. 

So sit down and make your list. It starts now. Because one of the ways that we end up doing things that we really don’t wanna do is we just put our head in the sand and we don’t think about it until the last minute, and then we feel extra bad, extra guilty for saying no at the last minute. And often we just end up saying yes because we can’t handle that much discomfort. 

So if you know that your office has a big cookie exchange party every year and you hate it, you’re like, I do not want to go to that. Then tell them right now, Hey, I just want you to know, love You guys love this job. I’m not in for the cookie exchange party. Just not, I’m not doing that. 

Another big one is buying gifts for your parents or your husband’s parents. Most of the time those people are, have money and have lots of things, and they don’t need any more things, so you can decide. We’re not giving them presents. We’re making them cards. We’re giving them an experience with the kids.

We make a photo book. We make a photo book. Every grandparent set gets this photo book, which they love, by the way. Nobody’s mad that I didn’t get them like bubble bath or a bathrobe, you know what I mean? And everybody gets the same thing. And it makes our lives so much easier.

Because the funny thing about Christmas is. I just see that there’s a lot of people that are giving each other gifts that both don’t necessarily want that. Like we’re all spending 20 to $40 on someone exchanging things that aren’t necessarily things that we want. We all have too much stuff anyway, and why? Why are we doing it?

Now? Not everybody feels that way. Sometimes. There are family members that feel quite strongly about receiving gifts and have lots of thoughts about them, which doesn’t mean you have to do it by the way. But I do wanna acknowledge that some of you have more pressure than others to do the gift exchange thing. 

No one can make you do anything. I just want you to know that right now. Just take a deep breath and I just want you to know that the Lord is with you and you are safe, and you are loved. You are perfectly wonderful human. He loves you so deeply. And no one can make you do anything. 

So let’s get rid of that feeling by either getting our heart on board with something that may not be our favorite thing, or saying a polite, I won’t be participating in that. And it’s just true for you that you do not wanna do that thing. 

And this is true of activities and presence and food and traveling. That’s a big one. I coach a lot of moms around. My family wants me to come see them, but I have to put three little kids in the car and drive 11 hours. I’m like, hard. No, if you don’t wanna do that hard, no.

Now I have clients who just love doing that, so I’m only talking to the ones where you’re like, I really don’t wanna do that, but my mom really wants me to do it. I’m like, okay. I love how your mom wants to spend time with you. That’s amazing. We can love that. Almost all of these problems, by the way, are rooted in love.

That someone loves you and wants to spend time with you, and that’s so great. We can celebrate that. At the same time, we can also say, you know what, mom, it’s such a huge deal for us to put three little kids in the car and drive 11 hours to see you, and we can’t do that. You’re welcome to come see us. 

This would be even harder to say, but it’s still true. You’re welcome to come where we are and stay at a hotel and we’d love to do Christmas with you at our house. Maybe you have a small house and you can’t host your parents.

But we have got to stop being stressed out, super anxious, putting ourselves in debt, being short-tempered with husbands and kids over the holidays because we don’t know how to set boundaries. And a lot of it is, I think we’re just not taking the time to slow down and ask ourselves, what do we really want? What’s important to us in the season?

So you have to do that first and do it with the Lord. Get a really beautiful picture of Jesus, or sit in front of the crucifix and just kind of meditate with him for five minutes until you’re really, really calm. And then say, alright, Lord, let’s look at the docket. Let’s see what’s on the list, and let’s go through it and just pray over each one of them and see what feeling is coming up.

Because the Lord never makes us feel fear or anxiety or guilt that isn’t around sinfulness. It’s appropriate to feel guilty when we sin, but not driving to your mother’s for thanksgiving is not sinful. He doesn’t make us feel rushed. He doesn’t drip us with shame. That doesn’t come from him. It comes from the devil, and it comes from the culture.

And quite frankly, I think just movies that we watch, which really is part of the culture, but we just watch a lot of movies and we just think, oh, that’s the way, and then we feel bad when that’s not the way. So this is your annual reminder that you don’t have to do anything, no one can make you do anything. Make a list of what you really wanna do. 

If your kids are older, you can ask them. I find that I can really reason with my older girls because of course kids want everything. Kids are excited about novelty and anything new and anything exciting. So at the first pass they’re like everything. But then you’re like, okay, but we can’t do everything.

So how important are stockings to you? How important is St. Nicholas Day to you? How important is it that you do something for your friends? I noticed after a few years that my kids did wanna exchange presents with their friends. 

But we live in this small town and so it is actually possible for us to do like a friend gift exchange where people draw names or we can make a short list of really good friends. And then what I ended up doing was kind of driving my girls into the direction of needle felting, like cute animals for them. 

And so they love to sit around in December and like needle felt a little bird or a squirrel. And then give that to their friends and their friends also do that. And I’ve signaled very clearly to the other parents, we are making something. We’re not buying your kiddo something so that they don’t feel the pressure to buy our kiddo something. 

So you wanna signal that to your friend group or the parents of your kids’ friends too, if that’s important to you. Notice how it can just feel so calm and so loving still. You don’t have to sound like a Grinch. You can say all of these things with compassion and warmth, and it will feel like that to you in your body if you’re not triggering a bunch of weird childhood wounds. We don’t need to resolve weird childhood wounds.

In this episode, but just know, right, that our people pleasing and our hope, everyone likes me and have to be part of the group and follow the rules and keep up with the Joneses. You know, all of that comes from woundedness. It’s not truth. It’s not Christ speaking through us, and that’s okay. We can acknowledge that’s there and then still decide what we’re gonna do this year.

There are usually a few things that I do. At Christmas time that I described as kind of eye rolly for me, where I’m like, I don’t really wanna do this and it’s not my favorite thing, but someone I genuinely love is hosting the thing or doing the thing and I go with a good attitude. I might have a little eye roll miss in the car on the way there.

Like, this is not my favorite kind of thing. Like an ornament exchange would be a good example. It’s not my favorite thing, but if somebody I really loved was doing an ornament exchange and I wanted to see my friends, I might participate. But I would just let my yes be yes. And I would know my reasons and I would know that I didn’t have to.

And then it just changes your experience of it too, because I think there’s nothing worse than not wanting to do something, dreading it for five days, sometimes two months, by the way, and then going and feeling grumpy the whole time internally in your body. 

Like what are we spending all that negative energy for? Which is super draining by the way. Why are we doing that? We’re not doing that anymore. You are this many years old and we’re not doing that anymore. 

So pick your favorite things. You don’t need to do all the Catholic things either. I’m gonna tell you that right now, there are so many special Catholic days in November and December, and when you go to the Instagram, you’re gonna see all these moms doing all these things, but that represents like 1% of the moms.

You do not need to celebrate our Lady of Guadalupe by having tacos. You do not. I think it’s fun. You totally could. We do that some years, but you don’t have to do all the things. All the things. You don’t have to do the Jesse Tree, you don’t have to do the Conti fans. All these things, they’re amazing. They’re beautiful. You can.

But the Lord desires that you know him and love him. And serve him. We were created to know, love and serve the Lord, to really check in with yourself what your motivation is and why you’re doing something and is it drawing you and your family closer to the heart of Jesus? Or is it just creating stress and anxiety in your life because you know he’s not asking you for that.

And I just picture him up there like, you guys, this was the opposite of what I wanted December to be like, don’t you feel like he just thinks that? He’s like, what are you doing down there? And he loves us anyway, but he’s like, I didn’t tell you to do any of that. 

Another great example, if you’ve done Elf on the Shelf for five years and your kids expect you to do it, I would 100% sit those kids down and go, we’re not doing that anymore. And I would let them cry and I would hold them and I would say, I know you’re so disappointed and I love you, and I will sit with you while you feel disappointed. But I’ve decided we’re not doing that this year. 

Right? You don’t even have to do something you’ve done many, many times and it’s okay for kids to be disappointed. Did you know that? I don’t yell at them for being disappointed. I don’t punish them for being disappointed. I usually hold their little hearts. But it’s okay for them to feel the feeling of disappointment. 

And you can say, I know how it is to feel disappointed. It’s a yucky feeling. I love you so much. I’m gonna sit with you right now while you’re disappointed. I have one fiery kid who goes, no, don’t touch me. Like runs away. I’m like, okay. He’s going through a thing right now.

But then we hug later and I’m like,  did you calm down? You were really disappointed earlier. Yeah, I was. It’s gonna be okay. I love you. And then you’re gonna remind them of the things that we are doing that we can look forward to. 

So I hope you see how lovely and gentle this can be, but we have got to push back on the culture. We’ve got to push back on the money, we’ve gotta push back on the sugar, and we’ve gotta set boundaries around relationships. Because you will be held accountable for how you show up on this earth, for your anger, for your sinfulness, and I think for your lack of peace, all of us. 

So it is not worth it to let the world tell us what to do and to just say yes and march to the beat of their drum. We will not be doing that. We were made to be set apart and we should look different.

Alright, my friends, if you want. More help with the holidays. I have an incredible mini workshop. Workshop even feels like a big word. It’s not. It’s a 30 minute class on not only this, which is making sure that the things on your calendar are things that are a yes, yes for you.

But also how to set boundaries, how to practice hard conversations, how to do a declutter sprint in your house to get stuff out before more stuff comes in. So you’re gonna watch it for 30 minutes. You’re gonna plan for 30 minutes, and you are gonna feel dreamy, dreaminess. About heading into the holiday season. 

So I want you to click the link in the show notes and go check it out and send it to your friends. Just send it to your friends. Everybody’s stressed in the holidays. 100% of the moms need this. They need permission to not be stressed over the holidays, and it’s just a personal mission of mine to help all the moms actually like the months of November and December. 

Alright, my friends, thank you so much for listening. I’m praying for you. Please pray for me and have a blessed day.