holidays rituals Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Can’t See Aging Mom Holidays COVID -Make Her Feel U Are There 5 Ways

December 8, 2020

Absent Long Distance Care Provider Holidays Answers

If you are a long-distance care provider, or a care manager that works with one, what’s the best way to keep in touch with the long-distance elder if you can’t visit on coming Christmas or Hanukkah especially now that COVID is rampant and very contagious throughout the country

Easy Low-Touch Non-Tech Ideas

Use low touch—the old-fashioned communication elders grew up – the Post Office and telephone. If you can’t see Mom or Christmas or Hanukkah, send a card. Older people came from a generation

where cards and mail were really meaningful. It is easy and really touches elders who love opening the little personal mail they get, especially from family. These heritage links are a great way to support a far away elder. Non-tech, they cause no stress on their part. Even we boomers who walk haltingly through the tech world of 40 characters forget that connecting with a stamp or a call is so familiar to an older person. Plus you give that feeling of warmth they always got when they “ opened” “ or “ answered” something real (not virtual); Try having the whole family sending a card even kids. A flooded mailbox on Christmas or Hanukkah fills their hearts.

If and you can’t see Mom on Christmas or Hanukkah safely due to COVID s, mail holiday care packages —bake or buy cookies . Bake it with your children and send samples along with actual photos of everyone baking in the kitchen or buying treats. Even if they crumble a bit, elders will smell the affection.

Easy Option -Holiday in a Box

If you can’t see Mom on Hanukkah or Christmas, send a “ holiday in a box for Christmas and Hanukkah coming up. Send a basket of kids drawings, candy, nuts, home-baked or purchased holiday bread that reflects the holiday celebration plus a gift certificate for a Christmas dinner or dinner with a friend. Give Mom joy in a simple package. For an extra special surprise, arrange an invitation to a Hanukkah dinner with a friend or through your parents’ synagogue or church

A Little Help From Aging Parents Friends

Skip that holiday in a box, if you can’t see Mom on Hanukkah or Christmas you can create a circle of care. Get the app Lots of Helping Hands through neighbors, friends, people in your elder’s place of worship, or a group they belong to. Then you can ask if they can arrange to include your older relative or friend in a Christmas dinner or Midnight Mass or Hanukkah meal, with Latkes or Shabbat service. You will then have an entire support team your elder with a whole circle of support in the future and not feel so alone.

REMINISCENCE- a win-win on Holidays-as people age they love this and you get their memories

Give your parent Storyworth. Print the prompts and drop off to your loved one then pick up and enter using the dictation on your phone then send it into Storyworth. At the end of the year, they get a printed book of reminiscence.
Join ancestry yourself and bring your computer to your older loved one’s home and show them your family tree as you build it. They can give you family history and memories as you create the family tree that you would miss when they are gone.
Get out your old family albums, with older pictures of your parents with your kids, and have them identify people in photos by emailing some of the photos to your older family members. Then upload the photos later to Google photos so you have both names of relatives, stories of pictures, and photos digitally saved.

Make Aging Tech for Holiday Gift

Send a high tech gift, if you can’t see Mom or Dad over Christmas or Hanukkah. Send a high tech device that your loved one can really use and figure out. I just ordered the Esky Wireless Locator because I keep misplacing my glasses.

How Care Managers Help Get for Long Distance Care Providers

Care Manager can do lots of things for a family member who is long distance and can’t see Mom on Christmas or Hanukkah. Geriatric Care Manager Julie Menack in her chapter “Long Distance Care Providers” in my book Care Managers Working With the Aging Family lists tasks long-distance care providers can do to make their own lives and their long-distance loved ones saner, sounder, and happier

Find a Care Manager Through Aging Life

If you want to investigate an Aging Life geriatric care manager in your parent’s own town find a professional who can help you do all this so you can remain a son or daughter and less stressed caregiver.

Dysfunctional Family Holiday Mayhem – Mom Can’t 4 Manage the Ritual any Longer

December 4, 2020

What is the Normal Family vs Dysfunctional?

The normal family is the hand grenade compared to the nuclear bomb of the dysfunctional family. When both are faced with a filial crisis with an aging parent being dependent and the adult child needs to take over they cower or explode.

Dysfunctional families have many characteristics.

They lack the ability to resolve conflicts and have frequent psycho-social blockages that prevent the family from growing emotionally. They fail miserably at moving through all family stages and orchestrating family rituals.

Most life transitions in the family, like birth, adolescence, and marriage have been very difficult to make, marked by a lack of support from the parents. Every holiday might have been drunkenly ruined. The parental figures are usually not in charge, nurturing, or able to establish establishes clear rules. They have never created an excel spreadsheet on tasks to do to orchestrate a holiday. Like a disease spreading down generations, they never knew how themselves, as their parents wrecked the holidays too.

Bad or just NO Family Leader

There are murky roles for everyone in the dysfunctional family with the chief role of the parent characterized by a lack of leadership of the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess on Hanukkah or Christmas, the family members generally do not believe the parent is there for them and can be depended upon. The dysfunctional family is colored by bloody strained relationships and unresolved conflicts and drunken ruined Christmas memories

Dysfunction Families Inspiration For Great Literature

is the inspiration for great literature. O’Neil’s wrenching plays A Long Day’s Journey into Night” portrays the most miserable of dysfunctional families. Alcohol, secrets that have been kept by all for generations splatter the pages of this great play like it does in all the ruined holiday’s children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Prince of Tides a tale of a southern dysfunctional family gives us timelier glimpses of a family whose center can never hold together and whose blood oozes all over everyone from one generation to the next. Award-winning plays and films, like Tracey Letts August in Osage County about a ruined ritual funeral from hell when Julia Roberts tries to beat up drug-addled, drunk presiding mother Meryl Streep.

Burnt Latkes or the Christmas cookies-inflame the family

When Mom does not make the very small things she was able to pull off like the latkes or the Christmas cookies- she always made every Hanukkah and Christmas, or burns them to a crisp- someone else has got to be the cook, and resentments skyrocket – tempers flare – and the torch just might never get passed.

Someone must take over the holiday rituals

The family is again thrown into crisis. That means someone must take over and the dysfunctional family has no model or spreadsheet to pull off the holidays while caring for a parent who did not care for them.

5 IDEAS FOR QUALITY OF LIFE ACTIVITIES OVER THE HOLIDAY TO HELP LONELY SENIORS

December 16, 2019

Loneliness in seniors is at an epidemic level in the US.

We live in an age where we can communicate with family across the country and around the globe with a few clicks of a mouse or taps on a smartphone screen. However, despite advances in communications technology and the increasing connectedness it brings, seniors are not always connected to their community and end up isolated and lonely.

Shrinking Social Circles Key

One of the biggest issues for seniors is that their social circles begin to shrink as we get older. Friends, significant others, and family members move or pass away. Even those who still live close by may be inaccessible due to limited mobility, triggered many times once a senior can no longer drive safely. Age-related changes in one’s physical condition, such as hearing loss and low vision, can make it so difficult to communicate that it doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore- the result loneliness and isolation. According to an AARP study, 19% of older adults in the United States suffer from loneliness; 8% of older adults often feel lonely, and 11% feel lonely at least some of the time.

In the UK, only 17% of older people are in contact with family, friends, and neighbors less than once a week, and 11% in

contact less than once a month.

Holidays are Miserable for The Lonely

The worst times are the holiday where Joy to the world sings to the tragic ears of elders who find themselves alone only surrounded by memories. How can we reach out to spread joy

Increase Quality Of Life Through a GCM Program

Lifespan, a 35-year-old care management program in Santa Cruz, California, has begun a quality of life program called “Well Being”. to address loneliness and isolation. Their service is designed to bring joy back to elderly clients, many of whom are isolated or living alone.

Based on the brilliant work of GCM Nina Herdon’s research and own quality of Life program, the Hummingbird Program, Lifespan serves lonely elders at any stage of their lives- from mentally clear to levels of dementia. Lifespan employs personal assistants trained in quality of life activities, to engage elders in intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual quality of life activities after the care manager does a quality of life assessment and creates a quality of life action plan outlining what activities would bring back joy and activities they love and can do again with the personal assistant help.

5. IDEAS FOR QUALITY OF LIFE ACTIVITIES OVER THE HOLIDAY TO HELP LONLEY SENIORS

Holiday reminiscence: Capture family tales during holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah. Use empathetic listening if you can. Make all the messages you are giving the older person—tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting—say that you want to listen to the client.
Ask questions that prompt the story, but don’t make judgments. If they are going to record the memory, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the client from talking. Record on Quick Voice Recorder on your phone. for their family Start somewhere in the story. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along. “You wore a yarmulke to the synagogue on the Chanukah and you would go with your mom and Dad?”

“Did your Mom do Christmas Hannakka baking on the holiday?” ” What was your favorite holiday treat”

3. If in a facility the quality of life assistant can ask if the older person likes to celebrate the holiday. IF so ask the facility if you can bring some decorations or ritual holiday symbols like a small Christmas tree, holiday food or a menorah or accompany the older person to a holiday dinner for community members.

4. On the traditional holidays celebrated by a client who observes a religion, such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, make sure that the decorations of that holiday are in their home, assisted living room, etc. Ritual music is played, a ritual meal is prepared, and ritual prayers are said.

5. Smell different scents like pine of a Christmas tree smell of gingerbread or cocoa. Our sense of smell is embedded in our brain next to memory. So some activities that might work with elders with dementia are making holiday scent cards, bringing scent, bringing holiday scents and tastes of ritual foods having them help prepare food.

Can’t See Aging Mom Christmas Hanukkah-7 Ways to Make Her Feel You Are There

December 15, 2019

Absent Long Distance Care Provider Holidays Answers

Easy Low-Touch Non-Tech Ideas

Use low touch—the old-fashioned communication elders grew up – the Post Office and telephone. If you can’t see Mom or Christmas or Hanukkah, send a card. Older people came from a generation where cards and mail were really meaningful. It is easy and really touches elders who love opening the little personal mail they get, especially from family. These heritage links are a great way to support a far away elder. Non-tech, they cause no stress on their part. Even we boomers who walk haltingly through the tech world of 40 characters forget that connecting with a stamp or a call is so familiar to an older person. Plus you give that feeling of warmth they always got when they “ opened” “ or “ answered” something real (not virtual); Try having the whole family sending a card even kids. A flooded mailbox on Christmas or Hanukkah fills their hearts.

If and you can’t see Mom on Christmas or Hanukkah he or if Dad is not religious, mail holiday care packages —bake or buy cookies . Bake it with your children and send samples along with actual photos of everyone baking in the kitchen or buying treats. Even if they crumble a bit, elders will smell the affection.

Easy Option -Holiday in a Box

A Little Help From Aging Parents Friends

Skip that holiday in a box, if you can’t see Mom on Hanukkah or Christmas you can create a circle of care. Get the app Lots of Helping Hands through neighbors, friends, people in your elder’s place of worship or a group they belong to. Then you can ask if they can arrange to include your older relative or friend in a Christmas dinner or Midnight Mass or Hanukkah meal, with Latkes or Shabbat service. You will then have an entire support team your elder with a whole circle of support in the future and not feel so alone.

Make Aging Tech for Holiday Gift

How Care Managers Help Get for Long Distance Care Providers

Care Manager scan do lots of things for a family member who is long distance and can’t see Mom on Christmas or Hanukkah. Geriatric Care Manager Julie Menack in her chapter “Long Distance Care Providers” in my book Care Managers Working With the Aging Family lists tasks long-distance care providers can do to make their own lives and their long-distance loved ones saner, sounder and happier

Find a Care Manager Through Aging Life

7 Tools to Spark Reminiscence As a Holiday Gift

December 1, 2019

Reminiscence isn’t new.

If you work with older clients, reminiscence can be a cherished gift for their holiday celebration

Before the printing press, storytellers and bards were how history was recorded-

Oral storytellers gave us the Odyssey and other valiant tales. History exists in their family, and Ulysses or Penelope might be sitting at your barbecue this coming holiday- in the form of your aging parents.

But storytelling only works if the teller remembers the lines. Family history has to be captured when the older person still remembers. So holiday events are a perfect time to tap into that font before it flickers. At the same time, you give the older person one to one attention, that they may not get often, someone interested in their past and warm memories of their childhood holidays

7 Ways to Capture That Family Ancestry On Holidays

Here are some tips to use if they want to capture these family tales during the coming festivities with aging parents—a perfect time to do this.

1. Use empathetic listening. This means to make all the messages you are are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- all saying, “I want to listen to them.”

2. Ask questions that prompt the story but don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking.

3. Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along.” What did you do on Christmas day? Did you open gifts at a special time?.” What was your favorite food on the holidays” ” ( you might ask before and make that special cookie and offer it to them?

4. Music is just next to memory in the brain shown by Alive Inside So use Alexa, Spotify, to play 40’s 50’s this Christmas music

5. Simple ways to spark reminiscence on Holidays :

Look at old photos together; perhaps from Christmas past or can be anytime. Choose ones from a period of time the person currently remembers, which could be the person as a young adult, teenager, or even a young child.
Sing holiday songs together or play them on Alexa. Choose carols and songs the older person remembers well.
Enjoy food like a holiday cookie that is a family tradition or specialty, particularly ones that have an element of memory attached from family celebrations perhaps?
Attend a Christmas or Hannaka service where the elder enjoys the sensory experiences of the smells and the bells -the sight of the pageantry, the whiff of incense or, the sound of a choir, quiet prayer said together or the touch of bright paper tearing from a gift.

Here are two technology tools to help you with this legacy-building for your older client or family member

6. Life Bio-

7. Use Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone

8. Use some prompts for questions to ask that will help older people reminisce

Reminiscence is part of a whole new domain in aging called quality of life or attending to the older person’s need for joy through activities that stimulate the mind. Reminiscence does that but find out more about how you can increase the quality of life of older people after the holidays and all year long

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Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”

Absent Long Distance Care Provider Holidays Answers

Easy Low-Touch Non-Tech Ideas

Easy Option -Holiday in a Box

A Little Help From Aging Parents Friends

REMINISCENCE- a win-win on Holidays-as people age they love this and you get their memories

Give your parent Storyworth. Print the prompts and drop off to your loved one then pick up and enter using the dictation on your phone then send it into Storyworth. At the end of the year, they get a printed book of reminiscence.

Join ancestry yourself and bring your computer to your older loved one’s home and show them your family tree as you build it. They can give you family history and memories as you create the family tree that you would miss when they are gone.

Make Aging Tech for Holiday Gift

How Care Managers Help Get for Long Distance Care Providers

Find a Care Manager Through Aging Life

What is the Normal Family vs Dysfunctional?

Dysfunctional families have many characteristics.

Bad or just NO Family Leader

Dysfunction Families Inspiration For Great Literature

Burnt Latkes or the Christmas cookies-inflame the family

Someone must take over the holiday rituals

Loneliness in seniors is at an epidemic level in the US.

Shrinking Social Circles Key

Holidays are Miserable for The Lonely

Increase Quality Of Life Through a GCM Program

5. IDEAS FOR QUALITY OF LIFE ACTIVITIES OVER THE HOLIDAY TO HELP LONLEY SENIORS

Absent Long Distance Care Provider Holidays Answers

Easy Low-Touch Non-Tech Ideas

Easy Option -Holiday in a Box

A Little Help From Aging Parents Friends

How Care Managers Help Get for Long Distance Care Providers

Find a Care Manager Through Aging Life

Reminiscence isn’t new.

7 Ways to Capture That Family Ancestry On Holidays

5. Simple ways to spark reminiscence on Holidays :

Contact

Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”