Welcome back to the Seasonal Life Skills Series, where we have been examining the broad topic of life skills through the lens of how the skills we prioritize can change across the year, both for reasons that might impact a lot of people or reasons that might be specific to us. 

In Part 1, we talked about some of the ways that differences in life skills can manifest through different seasons, and in Parts 2 and 3, we talked about life skills as impacted by the fall and winter seasons, respectively. In Part 4, we will be closing out (for now!) with some examples of life skills associated specifically with winter holidays.

The winter holiday season is unique in its gravity and the way that everyone’s schedules seem to warp around it, even for people who aren’t particularly interested in celebrating those holidays! They are, to some degree, inescapable and are likely to impact the way we use our life skills to navigate these times. Let’s take a look at some ways that the winter holidays might impact our day-to-day lives.

The holidays are a time rife with cancellations of usual events and scheduling of new events, sometimes specifically on the day in question and other times on a random day that just happens to be reasonably adjacent to the holiday(s) being celebrated. 

We might beg our boss to have the Christmas party on Wednesday, so we can take our tap class on Tuesday, only to find out our tap class is cancelled because that’s when they have their holiday party! We might find our usual shopping day just won’t work because every grocery store is closed on that day, and we might need to find extra time to visit friends and family. 

To add to all the headaches, there might be other areas in our lives that don’t show the same holiday flexibility and still have rigid expectations of us, such as work or school. Schedule management and maintaining a semblance of personal routine and self-care can be that much more challenging during the holiday season! If you are a self-advocate, teacher, or caregiver approaching the holiday season, it can be helpful to visit these normally commonplace routines and make sure they still fit into the way things will work at the end of the year.

The holidays are rife with special tasks, some we might be enthusiastic to try and others we’d rather not do. One reality of the existence of these special traditions is that even if we want nothing to do with them, we can’t always avoid those things entirely because we might sometimes still need to practice self-advocacy just to make our position clear. 

For those tasks we are interested in trying (or those we would rather go along with than argue over), it may entail using skills we don’t often utilise the rest of the year, staying up later or getting up earlier than we normally might prefer, or going to extreme sensory environments for special holiday occasions. 

Consider what tasks might be expected of you or the person you are supporting during the holidays. Helping with a special meal? Writing thank you notes after receiving nice gifts from relatives? Eating special food rather than the usual safe food? Staying up extra late? Going to a sensory environment that might require a sensory tool or decompression space? Considering the specifics of your or their holiday experience can offer a starting point for which life skills may require the most focus.

One reality of the holiday season is that lots of things get put on the back burner in the name of celebration and meeting the expectations of friends and family. We may feel pressured to spend more money than we usually might, eat food that we normally wouldn’t eat, or to stretch ourselves in to fit in all the things that we “need” to do during the holiday season. 

In the simultaneous chaos and rigidity of the holidays, it can be all too easy to set our personal needs aside or simply to find ourselves lacking the energy or time to manage our personal needs the way we normally would. 

If you or a person you are supporting is concerned about how you are going to, for example, make sure you don’t run out of your safe foods when the grocery stores are closed, or don’t forget your morning routine while visiting relatives, or bring earplugs to your nephew’s holiday chorus show. 

Thinking ahead of time about how we might need to adjust and what we may need to ask of ourselves to navigate the holidays gives us the opportunity to plan and prepare instead of feeling forced to react in the moment.

We hope this series has demonstrated the ways that our focus on life skills can be impacted by the season and even the day, and has offered some useful guideposts for identifying your or the person you are supporting’s unique context and the adjustments and specific types of life skills that might entail. 

If you would like to share some of the unique life skills you have developed based on your day-to-day needs, then we would love to hear about your process, especially from a seasonal lens! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and stay tuned for the start of a whole new series next week.