If you have worked to un-clutter Christmas this year, then maybe the after-Christmas funk will not be as bad for you this year. But even with keeping the right focus, working to magnify the Lord through it all, and celebrating Jesus Christ, you may find yourself a bit overwhelmed with the afterburn of it all.

Post-holiday depression can be real but the very title is dramatic, to say the least. Maybe we should learn to un-clutter it by refocusing it. Instead of seeing it as the blues see it as getting life back to normal. Maybe you can see it as post-holiday normalization.

As you un-clutter the house by taking down the decorations, you can see it as a chance to clean and reorganize. You can find joy in the midst of doing things that get your life back to your normal routine while still celebrating the memories you made as you celebrated the Advent of Christ this year.

Some physiologists actually suggest that instead of resisting disappointment, you should accept it. Reflect on what you expected and what you experienced, try to identify the gap between the two, and move on. If you reject reality and keep on wishing things had gone differently, you may end up in a cycle of ups and downs, surges of hope followed by crashes of disappointment repeated each year. (Nicholas Joyce in Quartz online article)

We can make a choice to change the way we process things and thereby have different outcomes.

If we have correctly celebrated the holiday, we should have grown closer to Christ as we celebrated His coming to save us. Throughout the Advent Season, if our focus was on Christ, then now we continue to celebrate Him and what He has done for us.

In fact, throughout ancient times the celebration or feast of Christmas didn’t even start until Christmas and lasted for 12 days after right up until the Epiphany or the Feast of Kings. So honestly, the celebration is just getting started!

What the Shepherds experienced on this first Christmas caused them to leave glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. If our celebrations of Christ coming don’t cause us to rejoice for what we have seen or heard about Him then maybe we aren’t celebrating right. I know that may sound harsh but truly it is a challenge. If the things we are doing are just wearing us out but not causing us to celebrate the truth, then maybe we need to evaluate things. Maybe our celebrations need more un-cluttering and a bit more focus.

We have an exercise that we use after events that we have planned sometimes to evaluate them. We ask these questions:
What went well?
What could have been better?
What do we want to keep doing?
What do we want to change?

You can do this concerning your holiday events and take the time to learn from them and not just be disappointed by them. If there are things that were meaningful that you want to continue, write them down. If there were things that were more stressful than it was worth, make a note about that and plan not to do it again that way. Learn from what you have experienced.

What made the truth of Christ come alive in your Christmas celebrations this year?

Focus on those good things. Go into the new year rejoicing at all you have seen and found in Christ. We celebrate His coming but praise God He came to save us and that is just what He has done. He brought us peace and joy, now we can live in all that He is!