Involve the kids for frazzle-free holidays
Christmas holidays are exciting but it’s undoubtedly a high pressure time of year, too. If you’re spending more time than usual around home with family and friends, it’s easy to wind up stressed and feeling as though you’ve swapped your regular job for cook, cleaner and caterer. Some organised folk will have spent weeks on their planning and prep, freezing dishes in advance.
How do other people navigate this time of year?
Transform drudgery into festivity
Angela Clifford, chief executive of Eat New Zealand and coowner of The Food Farm, a small organic farm in North Canterbury, has an impressive bio that includes knowing ‘‘how to milk a cow in a paddock, gut a chicken, find porcini and grow field tomatoes’’.
As a mother of three, she also knows a thing or two about how to survive the summer break.
Her advice is to adopt a positive approach that includes the whole family.
‘‘Food prep is something everyone can be involved with,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s all about being together as a family, connecting and having good experiences and not being too stressed about what’s getting done and what’s not getting done.’’
Most children will enjoy picking fresh fruit and veges from the home garden, or a pickyour-own outing to a local berry farm or a scout-your-own expedition to a local farmers’ market.
In North Canterbury, there’s even a local harvest market coming up where you can dig your own spuds and pick your own peas.
‘‘It’s good to get the kids out and being part of the solution. For us, collecting the ingredients
and preparing the meal together is ‘entertaining’. Reframing the food from ‘a chore’ to a collective activity makes all the difference.’’
If meat is on the menu, she recommends taking it outside to the barbecue. It’s instantly more fun than the kitchen. All the family can get involved with meal prep so it’s not just left to one person.
Same goes for chores. As Clifford observes, there’s no reason children can’t hang out their own washing, or gather beach towels from the back of the ute, (with the added advantage that they might then spend a bit less time on their devices).
Keep it real
Stepping back on expectations of how your house and table should look over this festive period is a good piece of sanity-saving advice from Christchurch nutritionist Bronwen King.
Forget those gourmet banquets, she suggests, and instead keep it simple by settling on a single main course and providing nibbles like nuts and cherries.
Supplement what you have with something yummy from a local bakery or deli and throw in strawberries and chocolate for dessert.
Stick to straight-forward summer dishes and platters that require a minimum of prep. A good tip is to roast a large tray of veges to keep in the fridge with salad greens and a little smoked salmon for easy-to-assemble salads.
It is perfectly acceptable to ask guests to bring a plate and she agrees with Clifford that it’s good to farm out chores.
‘‘If people are staying with you, ask them to strip the beds and hand them another set of sheets for the bed. You can give them a cloth to wipe down the bath or shower after they’ve used it. The best way to avoid stress is to take control and recognise that you need to be able to enjoy yourself, too.’’