what do you want to remember five years from now during the holiday? And what do you do that you're

not going to remember? That actually no one remembers and no one really cares about, but that we stress

out over. So just asking those questions, I think is more valuable than me saying, this is what you

should do, because it's going to be different for everybody. But I would love to have people think about that before we get into Thanksgiving and just, you know, we're off and running so that we can be a little bit more intentional about what we decide to take on and what we decide to let go of in this season.

This is Diane Bowden and you're listening to the Minimalist Moms podcast. During the holidays,

many of us are anything but cheerful. Thanksgiving, Diwali, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza,

and New Year's often make us feel frazzled and frantic, stressed and stressed, distressed and depressed.

But joining me today is Nero Feliciano, author of the new book, All Is Calmish,

How to Feel Less Frantic and More Festive During the Holidays. She's here to offer her strategies

for surviving the holiday season as a mother of four and sought-after expert on mental health.

Feliciano sees our valiant attempts to be happy and create a magical holiday. Meanwhile,

we are actually exhausted and anxious for managing family drama, loneliness, grief, crazy schedules, and overwhelming debt. The truth is, the holidays can be the hardest time of the year, but with Feliciano's help, they don't have to be. So I can't wait to get to the conversation with her, but quickly before we get there, I want to share a minimalist resource with all of you. I know in recent weeks I've been sharing a lot of posts that I've read on Instagram, but there's been some great content recently. And this is a post about why is hanging out so hard, how we lost the art of the last minute plan. And it says, have you ever had a bad day and realize the earliest your closest friend can grab dinner is next month. This is a conversation that I've been

having with a lot of people. And it says, have you ever had a bad day and realize the earliest, your closest friend can grab

dinner is next month? This is a conversation that I've been having with a lot of my friends

recently, where we state that we don't want to be so busy. And yet when we pull out our

calendars to schedule with one another, often there isn't room to get together until several

weeks from now. In a sense, this is just a part of adulthood. We're managing

children's schedules, appointments, our work schedules, our time spent with our husbands, our time spent

taking care of ourselves. And so when you look at your week at a glance, it really does add up that

you don't have space for much margin. And this post says it often feels like if we don't claim a piece

of time in our calendars, it'll

disappear. Those hours won't be ours anymore, but they will have been taken by one of the

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