At 11 pm on Christmas Eve recently, Niro Feliciano found herself sitting down to wrap Christmas presents for her four children, after already attending a church candlelight service and hosting a dinner for the extended family that evening.
It was a crazy end to a busy holiday season, and she knew something needed to change.
“I thought it was just unhealthy,” said Feliciano, a psychotherapist in Connecticut and a frequent guest on the “Today” show. “And I started thinking, 'We need to do this differently.' Not just for me. For my family.”
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Feliciano loves the winter holidays and all their cozy rituals, but for most of her adult life she has struggled to fit cookie baking, holiday parties, Christmas movies and the occasional scenic sleigh ride into her already busy life while running a private practice and raising four children with her surgeon husband.
“We run at a crazy pace all the time, so as soon as I started hearing about vacations, I started getting stressed. There was no bandwidth, no time,” she said. “And I kept thinking, 'How do I do this?'
In her new book, All Calm: How to Feel Less Crazy and More Festive During the Holidays, published in October, Feliciano describes how she consciously changed her approach to the holiday season, choosing to slow down, do less and focus on “community rather than perfection,” as she calls it. In 31 short chapters—one for each day of December—she offers simple, personal stories and advice for people who feel overwhelmed during the winter holidays, either because they're trying to do too much or because they're dealing with heartbreaking issues like grief, loss, loneliness, or illness.
“In my 20 years as a therapist, I have found that this time of year is the hardest for people,” Feliciano said. “I thought, who doesn’t need a therapist during the holidays?”
Her clients joked that they wished she could come home with them and talk to them about the season.
“The answer to that question is no,” she said. “But now at least I can give them a book.”
Feliciano spoke with me about how she began to feel more present throughout the season, her transformative “quiet morning” practice, how to deal with grief during the holidays, and why gift-giving has long been a trigger for many women she knows, including herself.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
(Maggie Chan/For The Times)
What is your attitude towards the holidays?
My attitude towards the holidays has changed. Especially when I was young and figuring out my family and being so influenced by social media, I felt like we needed to do what everyone else was doing so our kids didn't feel left out. We would all do it, but at the end I felt empty and joyless.
I didn't want my kids to feel like we were doing that, sacrificing all our joy for everyone else. So, they started to see me slowing down, they started to see me doing less, and hopefully felt like I was more present and connected to them and also taking time for myself.
How does social media influence our perception of holiday celebrations?
It's huge. I think it affected us on two levels. The first is comparison, which influences our perception of what we really want. Like, look at my crappy jewelry compared to this woman who isn't Martha Stewart but could be. Then suddenly the feeling comes that I don't feel so content. I'm not so happy.
But scrolling on social media also has a literal effect on our brain chemistry. We get a hit of dopamine, and then our body tries to compensate, and that puts us in a state where we become more irritable, more anxious, more depressed. It's kind of a catch-22 because we're so exhausted and tired that what should we do? We go to mindless entertainment and dopamine is released.
I didn't want my kids to feel like we were doing that, sacrificing all our joy for everyone else.
— Niro Feliciano
In your book, you describe the practice you call “Withsilent mget up» where you wake up early, light a candle, drink coffee and enjoy time alone by reading, journaling, praying or just sitting quietly before starting the day. I do this and find it transformative. What does this give you?
I did this several times a week during the holidays and I think it had the biggest impact on how I felt at the end of the season. I felt like I had created something that was just for me and it was beautiful and it was something to look forward to and relax into. Even if it only lasted five or ten minutes, it made a difference.
We don't have real wood anymore, so I always had a pine scented candle that brings back memories of winter and nature. I think part of it is figuring out what makes you feel great and then incorporating that into a quiet morning.
It feels like we should be feeling joy during the holidays, but after the year we've spent in Los Angeles – devastating fires, ICE raids, layoffs in the entertainment industry. and beyond — for some of us, joy may seem elusive this season. What do you offer?
I return to an idea that comes from dialectical behavior therapy: two things can be true. We can live in very difficult and painful circumstances and it is important to acknowledge this and also recognize that there are ways to experience joy; it's just a matter of where to look. Often I think you have to make a choice: you want to experience joy and you will seek it.
It may take some time to figure out how to do this, but if you think about what is most important in your life and whether you have some of those things, these are the areas we can connect with to find joy.
The holidays can be especially difficult for people who are grieving. What advice would you give them?
I would say, first, give yourself permission to not do things the way you've always done them. If it hurts too much, you can try something new. Also, don't force yourself to make all these plans. You may not know how you will feel until that day. I think you just need to respect how you feel in the moment and surround yourself with people who will respect that for you.
Especially if this is a new grief, trust your intuition to tell you what you need at the moment. Think of one person who you feel safe with, who wants the best for you, who you can be yourself with, and spend time with that person during this season. This will help.
You also have a chapter on the conflicts that can arise from disappointing gifts. Is this something that happens often?
This has always crossed my clients' minds. Many women are disappointed with this particular product. Like, we do this for everyone, why can’t anyone do this for us? This is especially important to me because my husband and I have struggled with this too. We've been married 22 years, and now I'm very committed to buying myself gifts and giving them to him and saying, “Hey, wrap this for me,” but it was a big point of contention early on.
Part of this was due to the fact that my parents were very busy immigrant doctors who came to this country to work. They didn't always have a lot of time, but gifts were one way to express love. My husband, who grew up in a very poor Puerto Rican family where there were no gifts, never knew how to do this, he never received them, so it was not important to him.
It's only in the last couple of years that I've realized why this is so important to me – what it's like to feel, “You don't love me if you don't put thought into the gifts,” and not realize that he never learned the language. It was my tongue. Now I can do this for myself and appreciate what my husband does to express his love for me: it ends at 11 pm when he had 16 surgeries that day and is going through it with me.
