My Secret Trick to Making the Holidays Less Stressful

The Magic Power of Time-Shifting Family Gatherings

My new book A TIME TO GATHER: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us will be published on May 19, 2026 by Penguin Press. Pre-order is available today wherever you get your books. Thank you!

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When my mother met my future mother-in-law twenty-five years ago, before they even sat down, they divvied up the holidays. My mother took Thanksgiving; my mother-in-law took Passover.

But there was a catch: my mother also took Hanukkah.

The reason: in the Feiler family, we don’t celebrate Hanukkah when the calendar says, which is usually in December. For decades, we’ve celebrated Hanukkah on the day after Thanksgiving, for the simple reason that with children and grandchildren dispersed across the country, Black Friday is the one day we know we’ll be together. We call it Thanukkah.

Many people hate this idea.

A rabbi once scolded me: “You can’t just move Hanukkah to whenever you want. The community is supposed to celebrate together. Your family is not more important than the Jewish people.”

Still, I think we’ve found the secret sauce to making family gatherings less stressful: time-shift the holidays.

Before you get all purist, hear me out.

Time-shifting holidays is as old as holidays themselves. Of the eleven federal holidays, only one (Veterans Day) falls on the traditional fixed date of the occasion. Next month, Martin Luther King’s Birthday will be commemorated on Monday, January 19, though his actual birthday was three days earlier. This custom dates back to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which introduced the idea of moving certain holidays to designated Mondays to increase the number of three-day weekends for federal employees.

Photo by Stephanie McCabe on Unsplash

But artificial holiday dating goes back even further. Three of the most sacrosanct dates on the American calendar—July 4, Thanksgiving and Christmas—were all time-shifted at one point. The Continental Congress voted for independence from Britain on July 2, 1776, prompting John Adams to write to his wife: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

The public, however, chose to celebrate July 4, the date shown on the Declaration of Independence, though next year the federal holiday will actually fall on July 3, thanks to a separate federal statute that says when Independence Day falls on a Saturday, the preceding Friday will be the holiday.

The Pilgrims celebrated no “first Thanksgiving,” of course, though presidents, beginning with George Washington, did assign occasional national days of thanksgiving. It was Abraham Lincoln who set the holiday on the last Thursday in November, and Franklin Roosevelt who later moved it to the fourth Thursday.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Christmas may have the most volatile dating of all. The Bible gives no date for the birth of Jesus, and in the early centuries of the church, the occasion was celebrated variously in January, March, April, May and November. Not until the third century did Christmas settle on Dec. 25, largely to co-opt the pagan winter solstice celebration popular in the Roman Empire. And even then, every family I know gives out gifts not just on Christmas morning but Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, or some other random time when people meet face-to-face.

Time-shifting, though, isn’t just a thing of the past. If anything, the custom seems to be gaining popularity. Who among us hasn’t rearranged a birthday dinner to a more convenient night or rescheduled that anniversary date to an evening when we didn’t have to get up early for a meeting?

Linear television has become a thing of the past as we time-shift programs, binge series, and more or less watch whatever we want whenever we want.

As for Thanksgiving, Canadians seem to have this one right, as their Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday in October but the meal is enjoyed any day that long weekend.

So here’s how time-shifting works in our family: Last week we held a traditional Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday afternoon. It just worked out that way; I would have been perfectly comfortable serving that meal on Friday, but Thursday happened to be most convenient for all of our guests.

Then on Friday night, we gathered everyone together and lit eight candles as if it were the last night of Hanukkah. My kids darkly joke that when I’m around, no one is allowed to receive gifts until we “grapple with God.” You betcha! Proud God-grappler here.

So I asked everyone to go around and say what is bringing them light at this time. Then we exchanged gifts from my mom and from one family to the others. My immediate family will celebrate Hanukkah more or less when it falls on the calendar this year on December 14.

Even my rabbi friend has conceded the wisdom our practice: “It’s America. You can certainly do what you want.”

As it happens, we started time-shifting holidays back in the analog days, before phones, wifi, AI, and other digital carpetbaggers came for family time. I believe in the practice even more today. When the threats to our sense of belonging are coming at us faster and faster, we need to respond even more quickly and even more strongly with purposeful gatherings and a ritual state of mind.

So celebrate the holidays when the calendar says.

Or celebrate when your schedule, your stress, and your sanity allow.

The goal is not conformity.

The goal is togetherness.

We should embrace it whenever we can.

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