Holidays have traditionally been women’s job.

Mothers are the high priestess of the ritual- like Queen Elizabeth without servants. The UK estimated the there are 25 to do’s women have on the holiday. It takes years to accumulate objects ritual dishes and religious objects used. It takes the left side of your brain executive skills, plans and organize, remember details, does things based on your experience.

Holidays are often done on autopilot

Women–recalling all the jobs that must be done year after year. It also takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) meal planning,

shopping, plus ambulation. Then add depression – widowhood, loss and you have the challenges of aging in managing this entire titanic ritual. Many times the aging Mom can no longer balance all these plates and the holidays shatter with the crashing dishes.

At some point when Mom cannot do all the maybe 75 subsets of holiday preparation

Then the torch has to be passed and an adult child (usually an adult daughter must take over. This is like secession, – Princess Elizabeth taking over for her Dad, King George, (who hated it and had a lifelong stutter) made famous in The King’s Speech who was handed the throne by his brother Edward who quit being king.

Mom needs to Pass the Torch- Baby Boomers Kids Shocked

Baby boomer- adult children and the aging parents are unprepared by their own culture for this new developmental phase of passing the torch. They do not expect it, like they did the nights of the crying newborn or the rebellious teen, and are thrown off balance by the sometimes sudden and usually unexpected loss of their anchoring aging parents, like when they find Elderly Mom is unable to pull off running the holidays Indeed, what must happen in this new developmental phase is that the adult child must evolve beyond the needy child, (I will still have Mom pull of the holiday as she always did) he or she has been, depending on his or her parents for that fiscal, emotional, social support and ritual organizing parents, like managing of officiating over the Christmas or Hanukkah celebration.

Geriatric Care Manager to the Rescue

In the normal healthy family system this filial crisis of Holiday rituals can be overcome and the adult children with the brief help of an aging life or geriatric care manager so they can let go of their former dependent roles and confront their parent’s loss by organizing and providing care. They can take over Christmas and Hanukkah by stepping in and grabbing that torch.

Dysfunctional Family Do Not Want to Take Over for Mom

In the dysfunctional aging family, this filial crisis is incredibly hard to trounce from both the parents and the adult child’s point of view. The really need a geriatric care manager’s services

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As Elvis Predicted

Many families have a Blue Blue Christmas-or Hanukkah. Why does an aging crisis occur so often during the holidays? How can so many desperate adult children get care managers on the phone and howl about Mom or Dad in December? There are a million bad reasons, – too much alcohol, too many folks who do not get along and drink that alcohol. But the physical basis for all of this misery in an elder is often a loss of executive function and IADL’s and ADL’s

Why ADL’s and IADL’s.

It takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) shopping for gifts, cooking ritual meals and ADL’s walking to shopping

, decorate serve a ritual meal, climbing ( getting all those decorations out of the attic), grooming ( Mom can be found – in a “messy ensemble” at the feast) by the older person in charge of the holiday to pull it off. Then add depression to the aging stew – widowhood, loneliness and you have the challenges to an elder, usually the woman in the family, in managing this entire titanic ritual.

Crash of Executive Skills

The holidays in aging families can be a disaster for another neurological reason. Mom or Dad’s Executive Skills have crashed just like a computer.

Executive functioning involves the ability to organize, plan, and carry out a set of tasks in an efficient manner. It also includes the ability to self-monitor and control our behaviors and multiple other cognitive functions and to perform the goal-directed behavior. It can be described as high-level thinking skills that control and direct lower levels of cognitive functioning.

Planning for the holidays takes those high-level thinking skills -to execute and carry out 25 different major tasks according to a study in the UK- Just think, planning a

specific holiday ritual menu,( brisket and latkes or popovers and beef prime rib )- then shopping for it cooking it, planning the ritual items in the celebration – a menorah and

Hanukkah bush, Christmas tree, and creche buying them or getting them out of storage on and on.

Why we may end up with burned brisket or turkey.

This is a massive task event/ planning job taken on by one woman usually and as executive functioning power down in her brain- the computer-, which is our aging brain starts to crash- the result- the family freaks out because Mom forgot the ritual steps.

That’s why we need aging life or geriatric care managers to help divide the tasks when Mom cannot do this any longer

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Holidays have traditionally been women’s job.

Holidays are often done on autopilot

At some point when Mom cannot do all the maybe 75 subsets of holiday preparation