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

~ Elaine St. James (Author) "ONE OF THE FIRST STEPS you can take to simplify Christmas is to rediscover the things you truly love about the holidays..." (more)
Key Phrases: holiday spending, sending cards, Christmas Eve, Great Spirit, Kris Kringle (more...)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 269 pages
• Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0836267850
• ISBN-13: 978-0836267853
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #568,625 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A few useful tips buried in a lot of filler, October 23, 2000

By A Customer

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.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great stress-buster!, November 30, 1998

By A Customer

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!

34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Some Good Ideas But Very Anti-Christmas, December 3, 2002

By	Kelly "kelly-lcce" (Kennesaw, GA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.