Destressing Christmas

Christmas can be a pretty stressful day if you have young kids, and like to have a big, traditional feast of a meal. Which is why we've started to split it up and make Christmas Day all about the kids, and the next day - Boxing Day - all about the food.

A few years after our kids were born my wife had this wonderful epiphany - Christmas Day was just way too stressful with kids, gifts, and a huge meal to cook. So we moved the big meal to Boxing Day (the day after Christmas), and put out a nice spread of finger foods for Christmas Day.

So we put together a reasonably healthy spread of cheeses, dips, pates, breads, bean salads, olives and more. We leave it out from late morning til the evening - though we do cycle some of the perishables through the fridge. For example the pate will only stay out for an hour at a time.

It really does make a huge difference in destressing the day. And it has the added benefit of making Boxing Day more about the food - so we actually have more time to really go nuts with cooking.