Friendsgiving Joy: Create Your Own Holiday Traditions
What is Friendsgiving?
Friendsgiving became a thing in the 2000s. Thus, the Merriam-Webster dictionary started keeping track of the term 'friendsgiving' in 2007. 'Friendsgiving' events began appearing on social media. The show 'Friends' probably helped popularize the event as the character friend group was depicted as sharing Thanksgiving together in New York City. Then, Friendsgiving burst into the national consciousness in a 2011 national ad campaign by Bailey's Irish Cream.
And that's how Friendsgiving was adopted into our popular culture and as a holiday seasonal event.
The Emotional Meaning of Friendsgiving: Belonging, Community & Fellowship
The emotional meaning of Friendsgiving is that important sense of belonging you get from gathering together with your friend group. Your Friendsgiving contains the joy and gratitude experienced from everyday support from your friends all year round.
Friendsgiving is also a way to mitigate the loneliness that can come from being estranged from your family, or from living too far away from your family to be able to celebrate with them.
Friendsgiving is a creative outlet as well. Think of hosting as a fun, fulfilling hobby! Your celebration can be designed in any way you would like! Perhaps design your style in an affordable way, including homemade food, decorations made with found and natural materials, and hand-crafted scents. These are all ways for you to create your own joyful holiday traditions.
Friendsgiving doesn't have to be an alternative to your traditional family gathering, but it can be an addition to your holiday traditions and celebrations.
Creative Friendsgiving Traditions: DBT "Building Mastery" One Small Step at a Time
The holiday season can bring up feelings of isolation and loneliness, as we live in the Insta-Hallmark era of illusion. From continuous ads on Facebook, to Instagram ready pics, to music videos on Tik Tok, it sure can appear that everyone except you has a large, loving, supportive family, a huge group of friends and plenty of money for clothes, food and entertainment.
The holiday season can feel particularly lonely if you're grieving from the loss of a loved one, or the loss of family ties due to abuse. Compared to all those glossy magazines, you may feel like you don't have a large enough family for a real holiday.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a therapeutic model to help manage your emotions. You can take a page out the of DBT book of self-help exercises.
The Build Mastery concept is about developing a sense of competence through achievable tasks that gradually stretch your abilities. Planning a small gathering can be an example.
Create Friendsgiving with Five Small Steps
First, decide how large of a Friendsgiving you want to hold. You can invite a small group of friends over. You might expand your creativity a bit by deciding to choose an overall theme. Some suggestions: a funny theme, such as a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, or sports theme, such as a Football theme, or the warm theme of People Helping People, with the price of admission to the party being three cans of food for the local food pantry.
Second, plan a nurturing atmosphere with your menu design. Feeding people has always been associated with care and nurturing. Make it easy and less expensive by planning a warm casserole dish and invite your guests to bring a dish as well. This way, everyone shares in the party and it mitigates the cost of a fun night out!
Third, plan a welcoming decorating theme, which can be as simple as gathering pine cones and branches from the local park and some small pumpkins from the grocery store.
Fourth, plan to uplift your guests' spirits with a Gratitude Tree. This satisfying craft can be made with branches gathered outside and then placed in a vase or a similar container that you already own. Create Gratitude Leaves to be hung on the tree. The Gratitude Leaves can be made by cutting out leaf shapes from colorful orange, yellow and red construction paper. Or you can buy one pack of post-its or tags as paper Gratitude Wishes.
Ask your guests to write a personal Gratitude Wish on a Gratitude Leaf and hang it on the Gratitude Tree. Gratitude Wishes can be shared or kept private.
Fifth, develop a warm welcome with your own creative mixture of holiday potpourri. Making potpourri is a hobby that's a sensory experience that brings in your senses of esthetic color, shape and tactile feel of the potpourri elements and light holiday scents.
Create your potpourri with a light scent, so that it doesn't overwhelm those who are sensitive to fragrances. Some holiday scents are cinnamon, pine, cedarwood, frankincense. And keep the anything scented away from the dining table, so that the scent doesn't interfere with the yummy food aromas.
Clinical Thoughts: You Are Enough.
Creating fun and fellowship during the holiday season is a way for you to ease feelings of lonliness and estrangement. You can do as much or as little as you want, doing what enhances your sense of well-being.
Explore More
8 Mental Health Tips to Avoid Holiday Stress: realistic expectations about energy, time, and money, plus making room for simple pleasures.
Estrangement, Loneliness and the Holidays: permission to change traditions and seek connection in ways that suit your circumstances.
Have a Realistic Holiday: Explores the hype around the holidays and how the reality is for the majority of people is not like the hype.
DBT Build Mastery Skill: An exercise to develop a sense of competence through achievable tasks that gradually stretch our abilities.
DBT Inspired Crafts: Shine On! Create Your Own Unique Version of Your Holiday!
Thanksgiving: An Antidote for Life in a Narcissistic World
