This is an update of a previous blog. Enjoy!

The holidays can be a wonderful time for many people; they’re an opportunity to spend time with loved ones, take some time off school or work and enjoy the festivities. For some, though, the holidays can be pretty stressful.

Every year, there are some people who aren’t looking forward to the holiday season. Some have difficult relationships with their family members, some are feeling lonely and isolated, some feel left out because they don’t celebrate Christmas and some are financially strapped and embarrassed that they can’t afford any gifts.

If you’re upset with your career or frustrated with your financial situation, the holidays can bring these feelings into sharper focus. The silver lining is that perhaps, this will motivate you in the New Year to resuscitate your moribund career or finally sort out your finances.

If you’re feeling isolated, perhaps the loneliness of the season will motivate you to get out in the new year and meet some new people.

If you feel left out because Christmas isn’t your holiday, there are several alternatives: you can join a friend in their celebration; you can create your own holiday traditions – like Jewish people who go out for Chinese food on Christmas eve – or you can fly south and get away from it all.

The holidays can be difficult when you impose a lot of expectations on yourself: you should be happy, you’re supposed to have fun, you ought to be surrounded by other people. But maybe all these things aren’t possible for you, right now.

If that’s so, try to go easy on yourself, and think about how to make things better so that you don’t have a repeat of this situation, next year.

You might be someone who used to enjoy the holidays until you experienced a loss at this time of year. Now all you want to do is get through the season in one piece. If this is your experience, know that you’re entitled to take the best possible care of yourself without any guilt, even if it means opting out of the festivities altogether.

If your family isn’t close, this is often most evident during the holiday season. You can get depressed, eat or drink too much, or argue with your relatives at the family gatherings.

Or, you could think about how you might improve these relationships. It might be time to talk with one or more of your relatives to see if you can finally make peace between you.

Or, if this isn’t possible, it might be time to distance yourself from the people who are hurtful to you, even if they happen to be your family members.

If your parents, siblings or extended family members keep behaving badly toward you, and you come away from all the family gatherings licking your wounds, you might want to consider spending your holidays with a friend or your in-laws, or on the beach with your partner or a close friend.

There’s nothing like the holiday season to underscore the problems in your personal relationship. You can avoid thinking about your frustrations with your romantic partner when you’re running around multi-tasking during the rest of the year, but when the holiday season arrives, it’s right in your face.

Why not take advantage of the extra time off to start thinking about how to fix things with your partner, or perhaps it might be time to consider a separation. You can book some couple’s counseling sessions for the New Year or alternatively, you could start researching a good divorce lawyer.

When everybody is gathering together to celebrate, it’s harder to ignore the disappointments and frustrations you’ve been experiencing with your career, your relatives, or your partner. In that sense, the holidays are a gift to you: a golden opportunity to acknowledge and address the problems you haven’t had the time to deal with over the past year.

The holidays can be an absolute delight or a real downer, depending on your situation. If you have challenges or difficulties that are amplified during the holiday season, you could choose to suffer in silence or overindulge in food and alcohol. Conversely, you could use your unhappiness as the motivation to deal with the issues that the holidays make impossible to ignore.

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