Anyone desperate enough to Google the term “holiday stress” will be rewarded (or become more overwhelmed) with about 395,000,000 results. Limit the search to “holiday stress statistics 2019” and the results come down to a measly 28,100,000 or so. There are even specific memes and GIFs on how to handle the financial, social and emotional stresses of the season, including my current favorite, the article that ran in this newspaper by a Buddhist teacher who advises practicing “acceptance,” an activity that even on nonholidays can often seem as challenging as climbing Mount Everest in an ice storm.

Still, the alternative can be worse. As the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute’s newsletter put it, “Because the holiday season often requires us to keep track of and pay attention to a greater number of responsibilities than usual, the brain’s prefrontal cortex goes into overdrive. Over time, a high level of demand can decrease memory, halt production of new brain cells and cause existing brain cells to die.”

I know all about holiday stress. For years I’ve hosted a Thanksgiving buffet for around 30 people and a Christmas Eve dinner for a somewhat smaller group, both of which started as a buffer against my own parents’ poor showing on holidays. (In the Dysfunctional Parents Olympics, mine wouldn’t even qualify for bronze medals, though my mother in particular had her moments, as when she routinely looked around my quite comfortable home and announced that she wished she had the money to “help us to fix the place up.” Never mind that she had the money, and the place didn’t need fixing up.)

As these events became traditions, they, too, became more stressful, what with food prep, snapping at my husband over when and how he intended to pitch in and, as the years went by, trying to keep my aging father from doing just that. (We failed seven years ago when he missed a step and broke his hip a few hours before guests were to arrive. I ate my turkey in the emergency room.)