It’s only October and already Christmas has crept into conversations with my coaching and therapy clients this week. Not the lovely, cosy parts: the walks in the crisp cold with a hat pulled down over your ears, permission to wear pyjamas all day, the cheesy films. But the weight of it. The pressure of being the one who makes Christmas happen. It’s usually the same poor bugger every year. The one who ends up planning the food, buying the presents, keeping the peace. Meanwhile everyone else is on the sofa, half-asleep in paper crowns, waiting to be told when to eat. And the person running the show? By lunchtime, they’re already done in.

I know the feeling. My wife has a huge family. Before Covid, every year, they would all come round on Boxing Day. Thirty of them, piling in with all their noise, bustle and buffet items. For me it was just too much. I’d try to plaster on a smile while quietly falling apart. By the end of the day my nervous system had had it, and I usually ended up ill.

When Covid cancelled Christmas for all of us, I felt guilty about how relieved I was. I told myself I shouldn’t feel that way, wasn’t I supposed to feel bad about this, missing out on my wife’s family tradition? But secretly, my whole body exhaled. For once, I didn’t have to plaster on a smile while thirty voices filled every corner of the living room.

And then, when the world opened up again and the idea of reviving the Boxing Day gathering came up, I turned to my wife and said, I don’t want to do it anymore. Not in anger, not with drama, just quietly, in that way you say something you’ve known for a long time.

And to my surprise, the world didn’t end. Everyone else seemed to recognise it too: that not getting together made things easier, somehow lighter, even if no one said it out loud.

That no might have been the best Christmas gift I’ve ever given myself: permission to choose quiet over chaos, calm over tradition, and the chance to actually enjoy my own house for once.

I don’t think we talk about this enough (well, I guess I do with my clients!), about how tradition and obligation can get so tangled up with love that you can’t tell them apart. You end up saying yes because that’s just how it’s always been done, even while a big part of you is exhausted and resentful and secretly fantasising about hiding out in a cabin with a bumper-sized tin of Quality Street.

But here’s the thing: you’re allowed to say no. You don’t have to provide the house, the turkey, and the emotional glue that holds it all together every single year.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, how easy it is to get buried under layers of expectation: Christmas, work, family, the disapproving (or downright shitty) voice in your head, all the stuff that ties us up in knots. And that the only way through is to start loosening them, one by one, until life feels a little more like it belongs to us again.

This idea of untangling has been showing up everywhere in my work lately, which is partly why I’m currently sketching out a group programme for 2026 all about exactly this: untangling what holds us back. The overthinking, the self-doubt, the perfectionism, the people-pleasing. All the quiet ways we trip ourselves up and stop moving towards the life we actually want. If you’d like to be the first to hear more, I’ve created a separate mailing list for it, you can click here to join it.

So, before I sign off: what would saying no free you up for this Christmas?