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Christmas Rituals and Emotions

Is the holiday complete without traditional family celebrations and holiday rituals?

This is exactly what a team of Spanish and Chilean researchers attempted to evaluate in a 2011 study. Situating their research into an extensive tradition finding that ritual practices are important for personal happiness and family cohesion, Dr. Paez and his team examined what role holiday-specific traditions had on emotional well-being.

Importantly, past research found mixed results in the role of rituals and positive emotions, but there is a rich theoretical traditional that seeks to explain how rituals cultivate empathy and social cooperation. Anthropologists have seen them as critical in developing group bonds, for instance.

In studying Spanish students during the Christmas season, Dr. Paez and his team sought to test this theory. Not only does Christmas tend to consist of a relatively static set of universally practiced rituals, at least within a given culture, but many of these rituals are also particularly family-centric. This provides an effective case study for the role of ritual on emotions.

Overall, they hypothesized that the participation in family meals and holiday celebrations would generally boost positive affect and reports of life satisfaction. There should also be interpersonal benefits, they reasoned, in increasing attitudes of social support and what they call “collective emotions” or perceived family climate.

The study was primarily conducted by recruiting participants and asking them a series of Likert scale-style questions about positive/negative affect, life satisfaction, perceived social support, and social loneliness. These were applied shortly before Christmas, and then another series that specifically asked about these same measures was fielded post-holidays.

The vast majority of participants took place in ritual meals for Christmas, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve/Day. They found largely significant results, with negative affect and social loneliness both dropping, while life satisfaction and perceived social support both increased.

They managed to conclude both that participation in holiday rituals tended to lead to greater well-being, and that most people studied did in fact participate in family rituals.

This generally supported theoretical expectations that rituals would result in such a boost in positive mental attitudes, but it may be important to consider exactly what these rituals consist of. As we wrote last week, people tend to celebrate Christmas with a variety of different levels of consumption or spiritual activity.

In that blog, we discussed how holiday traditions that focus on family or religious rituals tend to result in a much happier and low-stress period, while those based in consumption and financial exchange tended to be stressful and anxiety-provoking. Hopefully future research replicates Dr. Paez’s findings in that way!

A Truly Merry Holiday

As holiday season approaches, many of us must reflect on what exactly will make the holidays most joyous.

In a fascinating study from 2002, a pair of researchers asked over a hundred people about their stress and happiness during the holidays, including questions about consumption behavior. They found that family-based or religious celebrations tended to result in the greatest levels of happiness, as opposed to materialist consumption practices.

While the holidays, and especially in the United States, Christmas have long and complicated histories, Drs. Tim Kassier and Kennon Sheldon explain how they tie together many different strands of tradition.

These include, of course, religious practices, rooted both in Christianity but in a variety of other faiths, but that these practices have also been tied to secular celebrations of Santa Claus, for instance. This isn’t even including the commercialist and materialist elements of the modern holiday season.

It is this historical and cultural framework that motivated their survey study. Specifically, they interviewed participants as to how they spent their Christmas, such as volunteering, worshipping, spending time with family, or exchanging/purchasing gifts.

Similarly, participants were also asked more detailed questions about how much money they spent on gifts and material consumption, how much they donated, and what the material value was of gifts that they had received.

Finally, the researchers inquired into questions of environmental consumption, such as trash produced or energy consumed as a part of their holiday practices. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they theorized that the more sustainable participants’ practices were, the happier they would end up feeling around the holidays.

Each of these questions was included in quantifiable measures in order to test the extent to which they predicted a happier or less pleasant Christmas season. Overall, most people reported a generally satisfactory Christmas, while just under half reported that they experienced a great deal of stress.

In terms of what tended to predict a better holiday, each of the measures of family engagement and religious activity were strong positive predictors.  This may be due to the inherent satisfaction of either activity, or out of the feeling that people are conforming to the socially expected emphasis of the holiday.

However, this latter point is undermined by the strong social pressures to engage in a consumptive and materially-focused holiday season. Neither expenditure, nor receipt, or great sums of gifts consistently predicted positive experiences. Often, the opposite was true. Moreover, environmentally sustainable practices tended to predict positive experiences.

This is not to tell you how to spend your holiday, of course, but given the extreme levels of stress that so many people experience around holidays, this will hopefully give you some sense as to what relieves the stress of others and promotes their happiness.