The holidays can be joyful, filled with memories made with family and friends. This year will be different but for those of us who are grieving, the holidays can be particularly difficult.

There are a LOT of expectations and pressure at the holidays, for everything to be perfect, to get the right gifts, to make the holidays special for children and to manage difficult emotions around family members. Frankly, it can be a bit much.

Over the years, I have learned to let go of my expectations of what the holidays “should” look like and get back to the basics. The basics for me are spending time with my daughters and partner Meg, buying locally made gifts that are special to the person I’m getting them for and giving to charity. This is about it for me. The house looking perfect or getting the perfect gift, spending way too money and going into debt, running around like a chicken with my head cut off are all mistakes I’ve made in past years. When I’ve made these choices in past years, I’ve felt so disappointed that the holidays never felt perfect. Losing the need to perfect the holidays was part of my dealing with the sadness I felt about not having my mom around for so many Christmases.

The difficult part of the holidays is often that our expectations of being happy at the holidays means our grief gets lost and we don’t make space for it. The other thing that happens at the holidays is we hold tightly to the traditions that our mothers were so often responsible for creating and maintaining. And the pressure as daughters to continue this is intense and can be overwhelming especially if we’re not in the space to do it. My best advice is to be okay with modifying or creating new traditions.

The expectation to make everything the same without that important person being there can feel like too much pressure. And that pressure can create conflict. Normalizing grief at the holidays can take some of that pressure off and help everyone acknowledge difficult emotions are going to crop up.

Ultimately, going into the holidays with managed expectations and a reasonable understanding that difficult emotions might pop up at various (and sometimes random) times, then the holidays will hopefully be filled with new memories, memories that show you how resilient and brave we all are.