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Rethink holiday habits

Must you send 75 cards? Buy gifts for every brother, sister, cousin, grandparent, your daughter's Brownie leader, and the FedEx delivery guy? Visit your parents on Christmas Eve and his parents on Christmas day, lugging Santa-size sacks of gifts? If you think (or wish) not, first ask the parties involved how important such rituals really are to them. If they answer "very," ask what isn't.

Some other ways to pare down: If you haven't gotten a card from someone for two years straight, take him off the list. Give the kids' soccer coach, your hairdresser, and the mailman the same thing, such as gift certificates to a local bookstore or music shop. Propose to extended family that you each pull a name out of a hat and get only that person a gift.

LoVerde's gold standard for a holiday ritual: Does it connect her with someone  -- a child, herself, her husband, a friend, those in the community who are not having a good Christmas? Or does it pull her away by gobbling up too much time? Hence her no-fuss Christmas Eve and a one-per-person gift exchange among her relatives. "Doing too much means not connecting," says LoVerde.