This week is our final one-on-one conversation for 2024 about being a cool grandpa. In this conversation, I share valuable insights and tips for grandparents navigating the holiday season. I emphasize the importance of flexibility, adjusting expectations, and focusing on the quality of time spent with family. I discuss how grandparents support their adult children's new traditions while also considering the interests of our grandchildren. I also discuss the emotional challenges of changing family dynamics and offer practical advice for finding peace during the holidays.
The Cool Grandpa Podcast
EP - 210 Tips To Find Peace This Holiday Season
- Welcome in to the Cool Grandpa podcast. This is the podcast where we talk to grandfathers, adult grandchildren, and experts in areas of importance to grandfathers. Whether you're a new grandfather, a seasoned pro, or somebody interested in learning about relationships, this is the place for you. So come on in, join us as we learn together, laugh together, and support each other on the Cool Grandpa podcast. Hey, welcome in to December. Can you believe that the end of the year is already here? It seems like this year has gone by super fast, and at the same time, it seems like it has really dragged on. But I guess that's just how things go with time, right? Sometimes what's the old saying? A watch pot never boils, and at the same time, as soon as you turn your back on some food that's cooking on the stove, it scorches and burns, I think a lot of life is similar to that. So I hope 2024 has found you well over all. I hope you've been able to really connect with your grandchildren and build up strong relationships with them. And if you haven't had that opportunity, I hope that you have done what you could to make that happen. And we all understand that it takes two people to build a relationship together. And sometimes we don't always have that opportunity, even if we want to. Now, what I want to do is take this opportunity to sit down and talk about some tips for the holiday season for grandparents. This is gonna be a way that you can put these tips into place and you will find peace this holiday season. Now, I'm not talking about the peace where everybody sits down to a meal and the noise level is really quiet and pleasant and nice. No, I'm actually hoping that in some cases, you've got kids yelling and screaming and runny noses and all sorts of things that grandparents seem to enjoy, but it drives parents crazy. So I want you to have the peace that you are, I don't know, lack of a better word centered, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. So this first tip that I want to remind you of for this holiday season is to be flexible. Not everybody's gonna be on your schedule, not everything is gonna work out. Even when you make plans, those plans are liable to change. As soon as you involve another person into your plans, let alone other family members, grandkids, adult kids, boyfriends, girlfriends, whoever might be around, as soon as you start adding people into plans for everybody to meet over at this restaurant and we're gonna have a great meal and we're gonna go see a movie or we're gonna go see a play, whatever it might be, sometimes those plans can go awry and it drives those of us who really love to plan things out, absolutely bonkers. I'm a person that wants to already be sitting down, looking at Christmas Thanksgiving of 2025 and be putting in time off requests. I want to be talking with my adult kids about what are your plans for November of 2025. I want to be doing that now. So I love having plans, but at the same time, I've been trying to work on being more flexible so that I have more peace within myself when people inadvertently, no ill intentions, throw monkey wrenches into it. So remember, this holiday season, definitely be flexible with your expectations, be flexible in how you work out your plans with other people and just also kind of give yourself slack. If you're making plans, don't have everything super dependent upon one thing has to go right, then the next thing has to go right, then the next thing. Build in some slack into your plans and I think you'll find that flexibility is going to give you some peace so you don't stress out. The other tip that I have for you right now is going to be similar to being flexible and that's adjusting your expectations. We all have expectations that we're going to be taking the family out for that old fashioned Griswold family Christmas, you know what I mean? And sometimes we build these things up and it just doesn't happen. It's not there, we can't force it. And when we have little kids involved, when we have people that we have to have a lot of moving parts, those expectations for the perfect Thanksgiving meal, the perfect holiday activity, the perfect New Year's Eve with family and friends, you know, sometimes those things just don't work out. And so we have to adjust the expectations, you know, there's that great song. I forget who did it, that one, you know, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with, whatever that song is, that's a prime example for what we have to do in adjusting our expectations is that not having everybody all dressed up for a big family portrait picture may not be in the cards. And we may just have kids in onesies and kids in diapers while some of us have on sport jackets and ties and are looking our sharpest. And, you know, that's all right. Just, I guess, roll with it. You know, adjust those expectations, be flexible, and then you'll find some peace within yourself when these things happen, because, you know, life happens. And we all want everybody to be happy during these times. We don't want to cause a lot of stress on other people, especially our adult children and their spouses. So let's just remember to be flexible, adjust our expectations. The other tip that I want to leave you with, and so this would be tip number three, if you're keeping track, I know if I'm listening to this in my car, I'm going through and trying to do my count. So tip number three is focus on the time you do get, not the time you wish you had or want. So with long distance grandparents, when we do have an opportunity over the holidays to go spend time with our grandkids, with our adult children, their families, with our extended families, or even our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles, whoever it might be, is I think being able to focus in on the time that you do have, and not being worried or upset about the time you wish you had for these encounters. So sometimes I think it really hits us when we're younger professionals and we don't have lots of time off, or PTO, or vacation days, whatever that might be. I think sometimes we regret, and we already before the holidays start to happen, is we're already kind of regretting that we couldn't spend five days when we get to spend four days, or we can't spend Christmas in New Years with the grandkids, but we can spend Christmas even, Christmas with the grandkids. And I think that starts to put some stress on, and it also starts to make us, I think, grieve a little bit earlier than when we maybe leave. And this can also be something that happens too, even if you're grandparents and you live in the same town down the road, whatever, as the family has activities they need to go do. Maybe there's band recitals, maybe there's a soccer team pizza parties going on. Maybe there's different activities, and you want to be spending more time with the family than what they're able to provide and give to you. I think we have to really accept the fact that we need to celebrate and be thankful for the time that we do get and not be worrying about the time we don't get. We'll never have enough time with the grandkids. We're never gonna have enough time with our adult children. We always think that we do have time, and we also build up expectations of wanting all this time, but it's just never, it's not gonna happen, it's not life. And we don't want to, I think, become angry, become sad, start that grieving process and have some of those negative emotions come up where we're already worried about the lack of time that we're gonna have to spend with our loved ones instead of just figuring out and enjoying and maximizing and loving the time that we do have with them. So the third tip that I have is to focus on the time you do get, not focus on the time you wish you had. The fourth tip I have to finding peace within yourself during this Christmas time holiday season is that remember your kids are gonna be creating their own family traditions. And a lot of times those traditions are gonna be different from what you had with your children when they were young or what you had with your family when you were growing up. So allow your adult children to start to form traditions with their families. Don't impose what you used to do. You can certainly, I think, make suggestions similar to, hey, remember when we used to have fun playing Uno as a family on Christmas Eve. And you can make suggestions for your adult children to do some of those activities. But I think it's important to let them have the flexibility to say yes or no and be able to start to build their own traditions. In fact, as grandfathers, one of the ways that we can lead our adult children and still have influence is talk to them about the traditions that they're trying to put in place in their family unit, right? What are you trying to do? Are you guys wanting to do big meals on Christmas Eve? Do you open presents Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? What are you trying to do? And then find out how you can support those traditions that they're doing. And they may be different from yours and that's okay. I think one of the big things that causes stress in, again, this goes back to adjusting your expectations is that as older parents, we roll in and expect our adult children to do exactly what we did with them when they were younger and they've got boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, they've got little kids of their own. They've got different things going on. Their work might require working during the holidays where maybe your job didn't and so they're making these adjustments so we can support them but we can also ask those questions and prompt them to think about what it is that they're trying to do with their families to create that intentionality of building those bonds within the family so that as our little-grained kids grow up, get married, go off and start their families that our adult kids as they become grandparents. They have an understanding of what that looks like about how these traditions adjust over time. So allow your kids to create their own traditions, be supportive of them, ask them questions, find out how they're maybe intentionally trying to set some traditions that will serve them well for the next, I don't know, 20, 30 years and see what you can do to chip in and support that and be happy about that they're creating their own path, that they're creating their own expectations. The next tip that I have is to really consider what your grandkids want out of the holidays and time together and not necessarily what you want. Now, when we've got real young grandkids, those grandkids will pretty much do whatever we say, whatever we want and they're looking for that direction. I think as they start to get older, maybe around nine, 10 years old, older, they start to want to do certain things and I believe now we've got generations where they have online communities, maybe they want to go play games and hang out in their bedroom and be part of their online communities. And I'm not saying this is good or bad or anything, but I know as a grandparent, I'd love to be out watching a movie with them. I'd love to go do activities, but that's what I want to do. That's what I want to have that memory of us being together. What they want to do is going to be something a little bit different. And this ties in a little bit with the give and take amongst family, right? It's helping them also learn that, hey, you could go hang out with your friends. Go next door, be with your friends, be with your buddies. But you know what, tonight at nine o'clock, we're watching a holiday film together and we need you back at the house. We want you back here to be a part of this. And so it becomes part of that give and take in that negotiation. And I think as grandparents, we have to honor that. And we have to be willing to lose some of that time while they're gaining some of their freedom and help them through that adjustment. And it's not going to be easy for us because I know, again, this goes back to, I like to have everything well planned out. I like to have all the expectations clearly defined. I'd like to have these things done, even if I don't do it well. And so being able to recognize that I'm going to have to take a step back and be flexible and understand that my grandkids, as they get older, they're going to want to do what they want. And that's not necessarily going to be what I want. And a lot of times, like a Venn diagram, we're going to have overlap. And they're going to want to do the same things I want to do. And that's where some of the magic happens. That's where some of the things that build those relationships that they talk about when they're in their 50s and 60s about how cool their grandpa was, that they let them go off and be with their friends, but then also have these times together. So remember that during the time together, if you're a long distance grandparent, especially and you're able to be there during the holidays, is to consider what the grandkids want to do with activities, with their time, and that it may not fully match up with what you want, which is probably 24/7, and being right with them every single minute that you happen to be in town. So set those expectations, be flexible. And I also want to talk about is that as kids get older, grandkids get older, holidays change just like it did with our adult kids at this point, when they're little, they love watching Charlie Brown Christmas, they love watching Snoopy, they love watching Frosty the Snowman, they're into it, right? I mean, this is a season where it's really, for little kids, they really sink their teeth into and they're into it. And then as they get older, those things change. And in my opinion, some of the magic goes away, and it's not their fault, it's not anybody's fault, it's just, that's kind of how it is. And we can talk about commercialism and the expectations and losing the meaning of Christmas and all these kinds of things, but that's just kind of how it is. And I think it's okay for grandparents when you haven't been around the grandkids and last Christmas, they were really into Christmas, and this year you show up and they're not really into it to be a little sad. And if that's the situation you're in, just know that you're not alone. Lots of parents and grandparents go through this, doesn't make it easier, no. But it does help to understand that traditions change, kids change. And sometimes it can be okay to sit back a little bit and be bummed out about that, especially when it's the last of the grandkids that are starting to get older and starting to get kind of out of Christmas and they're not into making sugar cookies with grandma and doing up the red and green icing. And they'd rather go spend time with their friends and go to the movies alone with their friends, whatever it is that they do. It's okay to be sad about that. So I hope you found these tips helpful in navigating this holiday season and finding that peace within you that you might be able to not be as stressed out maybe as you were, that you're able to understand where some of the frustration, where some of the grief even comes from as the grandkids are getting older, as your adult children's family are not necessarily doing the traditions, the way that you did with them. So again, I hope this season finds you finding peace within yourself. I hope that you're able to enjoy whatever time you have with your grandchildren. And if you're remote, take advantage of the technology. Do the Marco Polo's in the FaceTime instant messaging. Do the text. Do whatever you need to do. Take advantage of this technology to make a connection. So take advantage. This is a great time to be alive. And so use what you can to build the connections you can and maximize the influence that you can. So I know I've rambled on a bit here, but I do wish you all the best this holiday season. And if there's anything I can do to help you out, please just send me an email, go to the website, cool-grandpa.us, there's contact forms, there's all that kind of stuff. Be more than willing to sit down and help you out, hear you out, and see if we can come up with some solutions together. So, hey, until next year, 2025, when we kick this thing off again, remember to stay cool. (upbeat music) - Thank you for listening to the Cool Grandpa Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do me a favor and share it with a friend. That's the best way you can help us to expand our community, as well as get the news out about how valuable grandpa's are in the lives of those kids. If you'd like to leave me a comment or shoot me a potential topic for this podcast, please go to www.cool-grandpa.us, look for the comments tab, fill it out, hit submit, it's as easy as that. Until next time, remember to stay cool. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)