It’s that time of year again.  Thanksgiving is barreling towards us like a runaway train, and the December holidays and New Year celebrations aren’t far behind.   If you’re like most people, you have mixed feelings about the seasonal festivities, especially the self-imposed and media fueled pressures surrounding them.

The year after I completed my PhD and was starting to build a practice, several local news stations invited me to share my advice about coping with holiday stress.  I’d done my dissertation research on stress and was working in the field of behavioral medicine, focusing on the mind-body connection, so I knew a little about the subject.  But my knowledge was more academic than practical.  So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to be interviewed on the air as an “expert.”

Thankfully the spots were short, and I managed to come up with some pithy sound bites. “Make time for yourself.”  “Don’t overschedule.”  “Keep it simple.” Good, common sense, right?  Even today, with many more years of clinical practice and life experience under my belt, I’d offer the same tips. But I’d add one more:  try to be flexible about your expectations.

Expecting yourself and everyone around you to live up to your idea of the perfect Thanksgiving feast, family gathering, or New Year’s Eve blowout is a surefire recipe for disaster.   If you rigidly cling to an idealized vision of a Martha Stuart holiday, you’re setting yourself up to feel disappointed, or worse.  So try to let go of your rules and image of how it all “should” turn out.  You’ll cope better when your mother-in-law complains that the turkey is undercooked or your newly vegan daughter and gluten-sensitive sister don’t eat a bite of the family favorites you worked so hard to prepare.  Who knows?  Today’s holiday disasters may even become tomorrow’s memories.

I speak from personal experience.  One New Year’s Eve, in preparation for a dinner party we were hosting, I went to great effort to make an elaborate chocolate torte for dessert, hoping to dazzle our guests.  I left it to cool on the kitchen counter.  When I came back to finish decorating it, I found an incriminating trail of crumbs on the floor leading to a chocolate-covered Golden Retriever.  A huge chunk was missing from the cake.  It was too late to make another, so I had to improvise.  I cut it into slices and arranged them artfully on a plate.  Nobody was the wiser, and the dog’s chocolate binge—which should have made him very sick but had no adverse effects whatsoever—became a family legend.

So be prepared to roll with the punches, and with a little luck, you’ll create stories of your own.