Customer Reviews

Simplify Your Christmas: 100 Ways to Reduce the Stress and Recapture the Joy of the Holidays (Elaine St. James Little Books)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I think the main problem with this book is that Elaine St. James set herself an arbitrary goal of finding "100 ways" to simplify the holidays. This was a bit optimistic. Instead, we get a few dozen fairly obvious ideas rehashed 100 different ways. For instance, she devotes no fewer than seven of her 100 tips to the general subject of avoiding or ignoring commercialism and advertising hype. Why not say it once and be done with it?

Another problem is that many of her tips are not actually about simplifying. Putting them into practice would be MORE complicated than not. For example: Do anonymous good deeds for someone several times a week for a month (#25); Come up with a new way of celebrating Christmas every year (#32); Send hand-written personal notes instead of cards (#36, 54, 55); Start a nonprofit neighborhood organization (#49); Have twelve days of "meaningful" gifts (#71); etc. While I'm sure these ideas will give many readers the warm-fuzzies, they really have no place in a book about simplifying.

Finally, there are a few "tips" that are really anecdotes, some of which involve circumstances so specific to the people involved that I can't imagine how they would be useful to anyone else.

Taking out the redundancies, the anti-simplifications, and the overly specific anecdotes cuts the number of useful ideas roughly in half.

That said, there are a number of genuinely good, original ideas that probably never would have occurred to me if I hadn't picked up the book. So I can't pan it entirely.

This book is chock-full of great tips for reducing the stress we all feel at holiday time. How much should we spend on our tree? Did I get the kids enough presents? What do I get for Aunt Sue THIS year? How can I get out of the office party without riling the boss?

One of my favorite section begins on Page 29 with "Take a Poll". Here, you're encouraged to ask your family members how they really feel about your holiday traditions. What traditions do they like enough to keep doing? Which are painful, boring or ridiculous enough to dump?

Another home run is found on page 87: Rethink your Christmas Card Tradition. St. James gives good advice on how to give your holiday mailing list (why not apply this advice to your Christmas gift list, too?) a liposuction treatment. And, all without guilt!

This book is intelligent and certainly seems to have a wide audience. Frankly, anyone with financial concerns (do you still want to be paying Christmas credit card bills next July?), time restraints (wouldn't you rather spend the time taking your kids to the movies?) or emotional issues (if the hoidays are supposed to be peaceful, gracious and dignified, then why am I so depressed?) should find St. James' advice helpful. Try just 10 of her tips and your life this December will improve.

I liked this book so much that I'm going to give IT for Christmas!

I really enjoyed this author's other book _Living The Simple Life_ and was really excited about this one. Ideas to simplify Christmas are *exactly* what I needed! And I did get a few good ideas from this book - maybe a handful. I agree with a previous reviewer who said the book has a lot of "Filler". It does.

But I almost felt depressed reading this book - obviously Ms. St. James really dislikes Christmas. The book was extremely negative about every aspect of Christmas, with the exception of encouraging outreach and giving to those less fortunate [something I actively support as well]. But she hates Christmas trees, Christmas cards, Christmas dinner, giving or receiving Christmas gifts [even suggesting that we are "burdening" our loved ones by giving them gifts]. She hates pretty much everything about Christmas and apparently doesn't celebrate it.

There is also a strong Pagan/Earth Religion undertone to the book. Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Christ [or at least it WAS until it was hijacked by marketing executives...]. The author never once mentions the ostensible purpose of Christmas - Christ's birth. She does however have a chapter on celebrating Christmas for "Mother Earth", repeated mention of Christmas as "Winter Solstice" [a Wiccan/Earth Religion Holy Day], as well as another section on how to bury arrows representing prayers to the "Great Spirit". [I'm pro-environment myself, so I'm not discouraging the "be nice to mother earth" idea, but it was very awkwardly done in a book on this topic].

She is very "new agey" and apparently very non-Christian. While I have no problem with her personal religious choices, its kind of weird reading a book on celebrating Christmas by a non-Christian. Kind of like reading a book on Celebrating Hannukah written by an Atheist or something. I think some of the suggestions she makes might actually be offensive to more fundamentalist Christian readers as well.

Overall, I don't think this book was worth the money. I wish I'd taken in out at the library. It was still worth reading for the handful of good ideas I came accross, but overall it was pretty lame, slightly depressing, and gave me a weird vibe. I think _Shelter For The Spirit_ by Victoria Moran has MUCH better chapters on celebrating holidays, and she is very respectful of all kinds of different religious beliefs [including Christian]. I highly recommend her book.

My problem with this book is it's too formulaic. Rather than providing great questions for examining our own desires and priorities for the winter holidays (which you'll find in "Unplugging the Christmas Machine"), the author gives instructions for simplifying holidays along specific parameters. I understand why that approach offends some other reviewers: One person's hassles - Christmas cards, stockings, cooking a big feast, visiting relatives - are another person's joys. What I like to remember about "simplicity" is that the goal isn't to eliminate anything that complicates our lives but to winnow out the complications that don't bring us joy or meaning (or are simply necessary, like mammograms, or fixing the roof). Children, pets, family, friends... can all complicate our lives while bringing us great pleasure! Holiday rituals, too. Elaine St. James' premise is valid and some of her suggestions for simplifying are good, but her approach is too ... simplistic.

I found the book annoying. Why? Because St. James recommends too many times that if you can't "delegate" to someone else Christmas chores associated with upholding certain Christmas traditions, just don't do them.

Lots of contradictions in this book, too. In the chapter "Remember What You Once Loved About the Holidays," she recalls "The fresh scent of pine when we first brought the Christmas tree into the house." Later on she devotes an entire chapter to "Twelve Reasons to Skip the Tree."

And then there is the irony of paying money for a book that tells you to cut way back on your Christmas spending. There are a few good tips among the 100 ways St. James offers to "Simplify your Christmas," but they aren't worth the price of this book.

The bottom line is that, for adults, "keeping Christmas" involves a certain amount of money, effort and knowledge about Christmas history and traditions. St. James seems to want to skip it all.

I purchased this book looking for ways to make our holidays more meaningful and hopefully reduce some of the commericalism that seems to overtake it. Instead what I got was a negative book regarding nearly every tradition during the holidays! If you were to follow all the recommendations in this book, you would have eliminated Christmas and become Scrooge himself!!! Don't waste your money on this book!!

Nothing new here; just badly written. The book was depressing and I was expecting some motivational NEW material to work on towards next year's holiday. The book wasn't even well-organized. She just bounced all over the place. Read Mary Hunts book on Debt Free Christmas. It's much better.

I am certain it is difficult to walk the tightrope between simplifying America's favorite holiday and coming off as completely Scrooge-ish. Unfortunately, St. James definitely falls on the Dickensian side of this line. While the advice is sound (cut back on presents, don't say no when you want to say yes, figure out what you enjoy most), the majority of the book is written in a condescending tone that left this reader wondering when exactly St. James got bitten by the Grinch bug.

I think part of the problem is that the book is written almost entirely with a secular philosophy. Missing is any sense of the true meaning of Christmas -- the Savior's birth. Instead, we're treated to St. James' decidedly PC philosophical musings. That would be fine in a book that doesn't deal with a religiously themed holiday, but in this case, it just seems sad.

While I'm making a list of my favorite and least favorite traditions (hints #1 and #2), I think I'll forgo most of the other 98 suggestions and instead try to bring the focus back to Jesus. Everything else will fall in place from there.

I rather liked this book. There is not truly 100 ways to "simplify" your Christmas, but almost everyone can find at least four or six to simplify theirs, depending on what they find over indulgent or too time consuming. Quite a few suggestions are common sense when you read them, but due to holiday over stress and over planning you tend to forget about them and a quick review is very helpful. My personal favorites are "rise above the guilt" and "halt the runaway train" which are chapters on emotions at Christmas and over zealous gifting.
I think the beauty of this book is almost everyone will find a few ideas to employ to destress their holidays. And that's what most of us need, not 100, but just a few solid ones that will work. You'll find them in this book, and be all the more merry for it.

This book had some great nuggets of information, but definitely had at least a 1/3 more words than were necessary- it did seem as though she was working to get to 100 things. However, there were so many things that I appreciated in the book that I could overlook the filler. Christmas is one of those things where we set expectations for ourselves, and this book does really examine where those expectations came from and how much value they bring to the holiday season. And in many respects, this book 'gives permission' to question the long-held traditions, which is something many of us need.