Welcome to Season 2 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel will talk through tough topics related to family meals. Pull up a chair and grab a plate — we’re serving up real talk about family dinner! You can get caught up on older episodes here. 

As the holiday season ramps up, there’s more and more online chatter about switching up celebrations this year. Many families are turning to the idea of a simpler, less commercial celebration. In this final episode of Season 2, Bri and Annie talk about why a more handmade holiday may appeal to different families, and share lots of ideas for ways to lean into a low-shop season. They also discuss how to get family members on board, and suggest new traditions families can try to keep a festive spirit without consumer clutter.

Key Takeaways:

• Go to 2:35 for Annie’s thoughts on why this shift may feel particularly appealing this year
• Go to 7:18  for some of the most popular homemade gift ideas Bri and Annie have turned to over the years
• Go to 11:14 for a discussion about how to get reluctant family members on board
• Go to 16:45 for some “gifts of experiences” ideas
• Go to 21:03 for new traditions and activities that can help take the focus off fewer gifts
• Go to 27:04 for food, fun, and conversation ideas to make the holiday season extra special

Related Links:

• Podcast Episode 1: Home for the Holidays?
• Podcast Episode 7: Holiday Politics
• Homemade Gifts
• The Family Dinner Project’s Holidays Hub
• Annie’s husband’s Latke recipe
• Dinner and a Movie: Family Holiday Movies
• 31 Days of Family Fun Calendar
• Family Memory Bingo

Full Episode Transcript:

Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to The Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa. Joining me as always is Dr. Anne Fishel. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Great to be with you as always, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: It’s so fun to see you today. Annie and I, I love that we’re getting together to do this because we get to talk about the holidays. Which is a fun diversion from the usual workday stuff, so I’m happy to be here doing that with you.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Me too. 

Bri DeRosa: And I, I have to–Everybody, I am starting this podcast with a shout out to Annie because she was right. Annie, you were right. I’m going on record. 

We talked, we talked about doing a holiday podcast episode a few months ago. Trying to plan what we might talk about. And at the time you said to me, you know, I think it might be fun to do something about homemade gifts and that sort of thing.

And I, everybody, I was lukewarm on the idea. I thought, ah, is that overdone? But you were absolutely right. It turns out that there’s been this whole kind of trend growing on social media in the past month or so where people are starting to talk about the holidays and they’re talking about, I mean, it’s everything from Boycott Christmas to shop only local to, we’re doing, we’re not spending anything.

Right. I think people are really turning to the idea of doing a more, I don’t know, simplified, homemade handmade kind of, um, almost nostalgic Christmas. And that really fits in very well with this idea that you had about talking about homemade gifts. So I, I think you were right and people are ready to think about how do we do our holiday celebrations in maybe a little bit of a different way this year. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I love it. Well, a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes. 

Bri DeRosa: Okay, so we’re gonna be talking about blind squirrels today on the podcast, everyone. I love that. 

Okay. I wanna start just by asking, I think there’s a lot of motivations behind these different ideas, decommercializing the holidays. Certainly some of them are, are possibly economic anxieties. Certainly some of them are probably politically motivated, right? There’s a lot of things swirling, but do you think that there’s any other kind of reason why people might be turning in a different direction this year and trying, being open to trying something new? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, I mean, I don’t, I don’t feel like I have a pulse on family life across the country, but if I had to guess, I would say it has something to do with feeling fed up with life being so virtual, being so much on the internet, and even the added push of ai. And the publicity about how dangerous AI chatbots can be for mental health.

They, of course, they can be positive too. Yes. But I think there, there may be a sense that maybe we’ve gone a little too far in the virtual direction and it’s time to reset in a more analog way. For myself, I was thinking about this subject before the podcast and I realized that I have been tending in this direction of doing more homemade hands-on things, I think since my mother died about 25 years ago.  She was an artist, and my house is filled with things that she made. Pots and vases and plates and watercolor paintings. I’m not an artist, but I’m still able to make things with my hands that I know remind my kids of me when I’m in a different state.

Perhaps some of them will live on after I die. And so there’s something about that I think that, uh, is for me, like an extra layer of meaning and I certainly have held onto. Anything my kids have made for me over the years, you know, a crudely stitched pillow or a, a book of poems or a book of memories, a painted mug. Um, you know, they’re all very cherished objects. 

Bri DeRosa: Well, there’s so much in what you’ve just outlined there, right? The push against kind of big tech and the constant over connectivity and, and commercialization. Right? Like I know my 16-year-old has started really kind of vehemently calling out his frustration with being advertised to.

He’s starting to, to say things like, gosh, look at this sporting event that I’m watching. You can’t even look at the scoreboard without six ads blaring in your face. I can’t watch a, you know, five minute video on YouTube without three 30-second unskippable ads for things that I’m not interested in. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s such a, such a intrusive and powerful force and, and I think it’s really amped up in the last couple of years. I mean, I, I don’t know if we’re just noticing it more or it really is happening more, but even if I’m talking about something on the phone, I swear there are ads that show up on Facebook or whatever, which is very creepy.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. It really does feel like it’s starting to infiltrate life and that we are expected to commercialize all the time. And so I think there maybe is, I think you’re right. Maybe a powerful inner sense that we might not even be aware of, but that’s trying to help us push back against that because we’re not, we’re not wired for that really.

And then I, I also just wanna say, I love your, your point about, um, the, the emotional impact of handmade and homemade things. I don’t have any artists, particularly, in my family, but I have several friends who make art and I have lots of little treasured things in my house that they’ve brought me for, you know, I can look over to one shelf and say, oh, that was my 40th birthday party where everybody brought a little homemade something, you know. And I have these lovely little reminders all throughout my house of people who genuinely cared enough to put some effort into something. And those things mean a lot more to me than most things that have come from a, a, a big box store.

So I would say–

Dr. Anne Fishel: –Cooking is an art form. 

Bri DeRosa: Oh, this is true. Yes. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: You’re an artist, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: But my, my, my art tends to be consumable, right? Yes. It doesn’t necessarily live on, but you’re right. And every year, you know, segueing into our homemade gifts thing every year, I think you know this, I make a special, um, Swedish Sweet Bread that was passed down to me by my great Uncle Olof. My kids have gotten in the habit of making lists every year of the people in their lives who are special enough to receive bread. 

And so I end up making loaf after loaf. I think last year I made like 32 loaves of this bread, which is a very, very labor intensive thing. But over the course of a month, I made like 32 loaves of this bread to give away, and it, it is given to people. who are meaningful to us or who we really want to thank for something special at the holidays, and that’s kind of part of our family gifting tradition. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: My counterpart holiday gift, like that, is, my husband and I for the last, I think 10 years, take photographs over the course of the year, and then in November we have a lively discussion about which are like the best 12 photographs that we’ve taken. No people. And then we print them and we mount them on uh, cards. We make little packets of cards to give to people, you know, it’s like an old fashioned note card. And, um, they’re, they’re quite, they’re quite lovely, I will say. 

Bri DeRosa: That’s a beautiful idea. And, you know, it’s reminding me of many, many years ago, my mother has since passed on, but many years ago she had always talked about her grandmother, who was, and I, I have fond memories of my great-grandmother. I was lucky enough to have her in my life for a while as a child.

She was a storyteller and she, she told lots of stories and she memorized lots of classic literature and poetry and things, and she would recite these things to the children at bedtime and it was all very, very much a part of my mom’s growing up and my growing up, and my mom lamented that she didn’t remember a lot of the stories. She could remember little snippets.

And so I spent a few months kind of asking leading questions and having conversations with her and writing down the little things she could remember, and I went on a little bit of an internet spree, found many of these stories and poems, printed them up, put them together with old family photos, and made a book for my mom for Christmas.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Wow. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, it was, and it was such a fun project for me because it felt like I got to connect to something from my roots that, you know, kind of predated me to a certain extent. And then also really meaningful for my mom. It was one of her favorite gifts, so I– 

Dr. Anne Fishel: –I bet it was. How special that must have been for her, on so many levels. The effort that you took and being connected to her mother or grandmother? 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, grandmother. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. 

Bri DeRosa: So all of this, by way of saying, you know, you’ve done some fantastic things with photos and memories, and I’ve done some things with stories and photos and memories and maybe this will jog something in people’s minds, as there are lots of ways to do homemade gifts. It doesn’t have to be that you’ve baked something or that you’ve knitted a scarf or that you’re able to paint, right? There are lots of different things that you could potentially do, um, that come from the heart.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. Yeah. Another, while we’re just talking about this kind of thing, making photo books of shared trips is another kind of gift, or I’ve taken to, each year, to writing a story about my son’s mischievous dogs, taking something they actually did, but then embellishing it to make it a whole story. 

Bri DeRosa: Love that you do that. And haven’t you had some of that made into like little books for your granddaughter? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I did. I did. Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: See, and that’s, that is such a treasured, wonderful thing. So I think this type of creativity might feel really overwhelming to people, but honestly it’s just about starting from a place of, what was something meaningful to us this year, or something memorable that we wanna look back on.

I think, you know, there are lots of ideas that we could, we could spin here and lots of obvious upsides to doing something that’s a little bit more personal. Right? But I, I also think that it could be kind of difficult to get families on board with a holiday celebration that looks different. 

You know, kids who maybe are used to getting lots and lots of presents. If we are gonna scale back or be more deliberate about the way that we choose to do things this year, they might be disappointed. Or you might have family members who resist change. What are some of the ways that we might be able to communicate with our loved ones that we’re looking to do something different and how do you think people can get past defensiveness or hurt feelings or the sense that like this is an unwelcome change? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, it can be a tough question. One thought I have is to really highlight, it’s an experiment just for this year. We’re not setting any new traditions or precedents. Let’s just mix it up for this year.

We’ve done this in my family, not with my immediate family, but with some of the extended family. So we used to exchange stockings with all the adults and brothers and sisters-in-law, and we would do like, let’s just do stockings that are $25 or less, and see what you come up with for that. Or this year, let’s just give each other experiences in the stocking.

So that was really challenging. I’ll bring you dinner for four one night this year, or I’ll give you a watercolor lesson, or I’ll babysit for your kids, or whatever it might be. So that would be one idea. Another year, and this actually has stuck with the next generation, um, which is about 10 cousins, and they didn’t wanna be giving each other 10 different presents. So they decided that they would have a magic, do, uh, secret Santas. And so each person draws a name and just gives one present, and there’s a price limit on that. 

I guess my thought is, let’s just try it once. Let’s just try it this year and see how it goes. I’ve tried to lead by example for the last few years of giving something homemade and hoping it would sort of catch on, but it hasn’t really, and I think my kids are so busy that it’s, you know, a little hard to expect them to come up with a homemade gift every year. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, and I think that’s such a valid point, right? That not everybody has the same level of access to doing something homemade or something really outsized creative. So I think you’re right that putting structure around this in a different way could be really helpful.

I love the idea of the 25 and under stocking. That’s something that my husband and I actually did when we were first married. We did not exchange actual, you know, wrapped gifts. You know, we had a, a first married kind of budget, and so we said, we’ll only do stockings, $25 limit. And, and it was, the fun of it was to make it as creative as possible, right? How much fun can you have with $25? And that was actually really meaningful to us. And we still try to inject a little bit of that whimsy into our holiday gifting, even though our budget has changed and our priorities have changed, you know, so I love that idea.

Obviously, yes, Secret Santas or white elephant, you know, the rule is bring something that’s already in your house and the crazier the better.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: And also, you know, you can also turn your attention to things like, hey, the challenge this year is we’re gifting things from thrift shops or buy nothing groups, right? Things that are upcycled. Recycled. Let me tell you, I am on a buy nothing group and the number of really nice items that are new and in package, or that are so gently used, they’re like new that people are giving away. You could make a wonderful, I mean, somebody the other day was giving away a bread machine that they had forgotten their mother-in-law gave them. They never used it. It was in their basement in the box. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Wow. 

Bri DeRosa: Right? I mean, you could really do a lot with that type of thing.

And like, I went to – our local library has a friends of the library book sale every fall. Everything’s like a dollar. I stopped in, I spent like $7. I got great stuff that was so gently used and I’m gonna be able to give that to people in their Christmas stockings or, or wrapped under the tree.

And it’s that type of thing, I think, that maybe people can expand a little bit to this year where you say, you know, let’s not shop all new. Let’s try something different. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: You know, I love that, Bri. And here’s another variation on that. I was going through all my old jewelry. I was actually looking for a lost piece of jewelry, but I got, went down a rabbit hole looking for, just looking through lots of things.

I came across a pin that was an ice cream cone with a strawberry flavor, and I thought that’s what my granddaughter likes. She likes a vanilla soft serve dipped in cherry. It looks just like my, this pin. I’m gonna wrap it up and give it to her for the holidays and I think she’ll love it. 

Bri DeRosa: I think she will. That’s so – see, this is the type of thing, right? It’s sweet, it’s meaningful. It didn’t cost you anything, but it is going to make a big impact. And I think, you know, this is the type of thing too. You talked about experiences, you know, gifting experiences has been a, a shift that my family has made for the past many years.

I think what’s really important about the gift of experiences is that same type of thing where you’re, you’re giving somebody the gift of your time and memories. So you are talking about this, this little pin that represents the ice cream outings that you have with your granddaughter. That’s a memory, that’s the gift of time as much as anything else.

And so, you know, when we say experiences, it doesn’t have to be something huge. Right?

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: Last year I did a thing for my husband. There’s a, a local organization that runs, they call them food fights and local restaurants can participate and you can buy a pass for the month, whatever the theme of the month is.

Burgers or sandwiches or chicken wings or ice cream. And for like $30 you get this pass and you can go to any one of the participating restaurants. There are usually like 50 of them throughout the month. You get a free sample of whatever that thing is, and then you get to vote on who had the best.

And so it was a month’s worth of experiences where we would, you know, once or twice a week go like, Hey, we have an hour. Do you wanna go on a quick date? Pick somebody off the list. Let’s go try the chicken wings. Right? And then we got to vote and it was very low cost. Really fun, really different. And it, it made us connect throughout the month, I think.

I bet you there are other places that have similar things and there are, like, I know friends who have done city scavenger hunts that you can look online and find a, a city scavenger hunt, or like in the city of Providence there is, there are public murals and there’s like an app that you can get where you can walk around and find all the murals and look at the art, and that would be a, a cool gift for somebody.

Like, Hey, we’re gonna spend a day going and looking at the art and we’ll grab hot chocolate. Here’s the gift certificate for a hot chocolate at a, at a local cafe that’s near the, the public art. Right. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right, right. 

Bri DeRosa: It doesn’t have to be a vacation, I guess is what I’m saying. It doesn’t have to be some big ticket item, but thinking of the people in your life, the things they like to do, and making them that kind of implicit promise that you are going to spend that time with them, I think is a really nice way to shift the gifting to what matters. Which is, is spending time together, being together and making those memories.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. Another. I think it’s a slight variation on that, which is giving an experience that takes a little bit of time, um, that you share with somebody else is to give a playlist. I love it when my kids will send me a playlist on Spotify of the music that they’re enjoying now. Or a playlist that I might listen to when I’m cooking, or I’ve made playlists for our grandchildren when they were born that had to do with, uh, you know, a baby boy. A baby girl. So those are, those are very nice too. And basically free. 

Bri DeRosa: Yes. No, that’s a great idea. And we, we actually, you’re reminding me, we did that Spotify now has it already done for you, but before they did the TV show The Bear, which you and I both watch and we actually have a podcast episode about. But my husband’s a big fan and the kind of like, I wanna call it Dad Rock playlist of the Bear, right? The soundtrack is very much his type of music. And so when the show was first starting and first becoming a thing, and before they had the playlists already done, one of my sons and I spent time making him a playlist, looking up all the songs from the season and putting them on a playlist.

And we did, we put it in his Christmas stocking like, Hey, here’s the, the link to your specialized Bear playlist. And he still, he listens to it all the time. So you’re right. It’s a great, great idea and it is low cost or free, depending on how you do the streaming service. 

Yeah. So many great ideas out there, all about spending time together and I, I think this is a great moment to pivot because this puts me in mind of, I think part of people’s anxiety about changing up the present situation is really about kind of filling that void where there are a lot of people out there who are really used to having a lot of gifts, let’s say on Christmas morning. Um, and they spend hours and hours kind of opening gifts and, and that’s like the big activity of the day, right? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: And they’re worried about not changing the gifting so much as how are we going to fill the time so that we’re not sitting there after a half an hour looking at each other, going, well, now what? Right. This, we’re in let down mode, so how do we make the holidays feel particularly special and connected and really, really fun when we remove that kind of pre-programmed activity of opening. Right? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. Well, my, my first thought is something I used to do when I flew with my kids when they were young, and I would have like three gifts for them and I would wrap them within an inch of their lives, the gifts, so the unwrapping took a really long time. So that– 

Bri DeRosa: –Like a box within a box within a box?

Dr. Anne Fishel: Exactly. That could stretch out the opening of presents. 

Bri DeRosa: That is so smart. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: But that’s not very environmentally conscious. 

Bri DeRosa: You could use, you know what? You could make homemade wrappings. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, that’s true. Newspaper. 

Bri DeRosa: Yep.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Paper bags. One thought I had was to make a treasure hunt. A family treasure hunt to go to get to this gift or that gift that would, that could take you around the neighborhood. It could take you up and down floors in the house if you’ve got that. You, um, you know, puzzling together about what this silly little poem is all about.

So I think that could be fun and take up some time. 

What do you think? 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, no, I, I love that idea. I think that’s really, really cool. And I also think that if you’re listening to this and you’re going, oh my gosh. So I not only have to change the way that I gift and have fewer things, but I also have to come up with an entire scavenger hunt. Are you kidding me? I think that there are some other very simple ways to stretch things out. 

For example, you might do what a friend of mine, her family always did was they would stretch out the day by doing only stockings in the morning, and then they would all get occupied with like a hot chocolate bar and a family movie, and then they would get occupied with a big Christmas lunch.

And then they would go sledding or take a walk or have some sort of like fun thing that they did together. And then they would all, they would go visiting to the grandparents or whatever, and all of the actual gifts would get opened at night. So it made the day, like it flipped the script on the presents don’t happen first thing, they’re part of the buildup of the whole day. So that’s one way to do that. 

Another way to do that is you can have the presents Christmas morning and, and the stockings and the whole thing, right? But you maybe do one present an hour. And this works better if you have older kids who can wait a little bit, probably.

Or adults, right? But like in between, we’re going to read a story together. We’re going to again, watch a, watch a Christmas movie, right? Maybe have your, your playlist for the day kind of set up. But we’re gonna watch the Muppets here and we’re going gonna watch Rudolph here and we’re gonna watch Elf at this time and just kind of space it out.

Have some fun activities, like you could do a gingerbread making competition with graham crackers. Don’t bother baking the gingerbread or, or buying a kit, right? You can just, graham crackers, icing, and candy will make fun Gingerbread houses. You could get everybody involved in making the food for the day. Let’s say you’re gonna do a low key charcuterie board. That’s a fun activity for people to put together. And as kids get older, particularly they can do things like, oh, I’m gonna make tomato and mozzarella candy canes, and you can, you can kind of have a little friendly competition for the most creative little charcuterie board or the best tasting hot chocolate combination.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. I love all those ideas. 

Bri DeRosa: I wonder what you think about this. One of the things that we are trying to get back to is, to your point, we spend so much time online and connected to the outside world that I think sometimes we forget how to just be in our inside world and how to just spend time together with board games and puzzles and books. We are not picking up a device. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: Right. And so I think maybe that’s actually the challenge of all of this for this year is reminding people how to get back to that… 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Analog life. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Real life. Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: That like, nervous system reset. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. You know, yeah, maybe it’s taking a walk and collecting colorful leaves and acorns and coming back and making some collages together. 

Bri DeRosa: Or making food collages.

One of the things we used to do when my kids were little, um, and we don’t do it as much anymore, but we would always, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we would make homemade pizza for dinner and they would make pictures with the toppings. Christmas pictures. That was usually the day we would decorate the house and stuff. So they’d be feeling festive, and they’d make like snowmen out of mozzarella and black olives or they’d try to make Santa and his reindeer. 

Usually by the time they came out of the oven, they looked like nightmare fuel, which was part of the fun, right? This horrible deformed reindeer coming out of the oven and you’d eat it.

Dr. Anne Fishel: So should we do our food fun and conversation that we do at the end of every podcast? 

Bri DeRosa: I think, yeah. I think let’s go for it. So food, I mean, we’ve been talking about it a little bit throughout. Everybody has their food traditions and sometimes we change them up from year to year. And I think I told you when we were preparing for this podcast that a good friend of mine realized in recent years her family, she actually works for a church and her family is very involved there. And she said Christmas Eve has become such a sprint for them that she, she threw up her hands and said, okay, homemade pizza’s the best I can do. And it turned out to be like the most fun, relaxed Christmas Eve they had had in a long time. And so now that’s their tradition. 

So we were talking about, this is maybe the time to reexamine everything, right? If you’re gonna go different on the gifts, maybe you wanna reexamine like what serves you and what doesn’t. And do you wanna make it simpler or do you wanna spend the newfound time and money on making it more elegant or more festive, or you know, which way do you wanna go?

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. Last year, in addition to celebrating Christmas, ’cause my husband is Christian, we also always have a Hanukkah party because I’m Jewish and last year I had the grandchildren. I didn’t wanna do my usual dinner for 60, which is usually what the Hanukkah party would be. So simplifying it, we had a latke bar, so there were tons of potato pancakes, and then you could customize them with salmon, with creme fraiche, with applesauce, with sour cream, with inexpensive caviar.

And that was the main show. And then there was a charcuterie board and a lot of cookies. And nobody seemed to miss all the lasagnas and eggplant parms and things I used to make. 

Bri DeRosa: First of all, you know I love that you do a latke bar, and I know we have your latke recipe on the site. Uh, it’s your husband’s recipe actually. Chris came up with this like, perfect recipe, but I wanna let everybody know that that is available and they should grab it from our show notes. 

And I love that you did that and it sounds actually really fun, really delicious, and a lot more low key than all that effort for 60 people. Definitely. And I would say for me, like the, the guidance here would be, if it’s not a family tradition or something time honored and wonderful that you really wanna continue, choose either something you can make ahead and not be working on the holiday. Right? Not be running yourself off your feet. 

Or choose something that everybody can get their hands in together and make it together. And that’s part of your whole celebration, is that coming together to do the food as an activity and an act of love and service to each other. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I second that wholeheartedly, Bri.

Bri DeRosa: I wanna definitely turn people’s attention to two things on our site that we haven’t talked about. One is 31 Days of Family Fun, which is a calendar that we have printed up and, and you can, you can print it out, it’s a PDF, but it has something simple that you can do every day for the month of December.

And whether you do them every day, or you take some of these little simple, fun ideas and you incorporate them into a strategy for your holiday celebration. It just gives a lot of different unique twists on little things you can do to make things feel festive. 

And then Annie, I know, uh, you and I have been talking lately about our dinner and a movie stuff. Right?

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right, yeah. So there’s a, uh, we did this in collaboration with Common Sense and there are five movies, um, around a theme. And one of the themes is holiday movies, and it’s for different ages and there are foods that go with it, and conversation starters that go with each movie. So that might be something to look at as well. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, that could be a really fun thing to do. And, and honestly, that’s also a really fun thing for like those awkward days between like. Christmas and New Year’s, where you’re still, kids are off school and everybody’s still in festive mode, but also in like that weird lull where you’re just like, how much cheese have we eaten and what day is it?

So maybe that, that would be a kind of a fun post holiday activity as well. Right. Yeah. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: And then conversation starters. 

Bri DeRosa: Conversation starters. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: So I think maybe sometime ahead of the holidays, that might be kind of now to ask at dinner, what was the best gift you ever got? What was the worst gift you ever got?

And, and why? For both of those, what was the funniest gift you ever got? What gift did you most enjoy giving? And why was that? And that might be a way to start to just loosen up some ideas about what gift giving might look like this season. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s, those are good, good questions. And I think also we have on our holidays hub, we have some sets of conversation starters around things like family holiday traditions and family recipes and things that you might wanna add in.

And we also have, this is a game and a conversation thing. 20 questions about a family memory, and we have that–  actually family holiday memory and, and again, printable or downloadable, if you wanna look at all of the different, we made it into a bingo game even. You can look at all of the different things.

So that’s another way to kind of get at the conversation this season and also have a really good time doing it. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, that could be a Christmas day or a Hanukkah Day activity, too.

Bri DeRosa: It absolutely could be. It absolutely could be. Yeah. Um, we’ve just unloaded a whole bunch of festive cheer all over our listeners and I, I just wanna say Happy holidays, whatever your celebration is. Happy holidays and greetings of the season to everyone out there. 

And a happy New Year as well, because this is our last podcast of 2025 and the last podcast of season two. We’ve done two seasons now of the Family Dinner Project podcast, Annie, I can’t believe that.

Dr. Anne Fishel: I know. We’ve got some good ideas up our sleeve for next year. 

Bri DeRosa: I am really excited about next year on the podcast. I think we’re gonna, we’re gonna have a lot of great stuff and I hope everybody’s gonna tune in. As always, if you have questions, thoughts, anything, reach out to us. You can contact us through our website or through social media.

We’re active on Facebook and Instagram and Threads and that’s it. So Happy holidays, Annie. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Happy holidays, Bri. Happy New Year. 

Bri DeRosa: Happy New Year.