Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

The topic of today is a holiday survival kit. And knowing me, you know, I probably don't mean

rations for if your car breaks down, although that would be a good thing to have.

Also, if any of you are even going in a car, who knows? We're all just like hanging loose in

the pandemic, right? Sorry, that dates this recording. But long, long ago, when I first started

working as a coach, I realized that holidays are not

vacation days for coaches, therapists, police officers, health care workers, because crazy

things happen at the holidays and people need support and they need help. So I started thinking, I need my survival kit

for my coaching clients. And I first wrote about these in an article for the Oprah Magazine. Oh,

the Oprah Magazine, I don't know, like a long time ago, like 25 years ago. And just to toot my own kazoo, people liked it so much that

the Today Show, was it the Today Show, Good Morning America, that was it. They flew me to New York

and put me on camera and had me describe these to America back when the internet was barely even a thing and everybody

watched TV. So that's, that will be before the living lifetime of almost everybody listening

to this. Anyway, I declare that these tools stand the test of time and they've been an annual

tradition for me ever since since I just do some sort

of production post broadcast or whatever to remind people to use your psychological survival

toolkits last week I talked about how the holidays are made of stories and our minds are made of

stories and how shifting the stories

shifts everything and can make your whole holiday better and better. A few people asked, well,

how do you get your family to go along? Hmm, hmm. Well asked, say I. Because not being able to get

your family to sort of see eye to eye with you is from time immemorial

the difficult thing about the holidays. That's why in Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens did not write

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