Give your family a stress-free Xmas

Sonia Jenkins won't have Christmas with Lara and Jessica. Photo / Doug Sherring

This year, for the first time, Sonia Jenkins won't celebrate Christmas Day with her husband and daughters.

They'll be at home in Auckland, perhaps enjoying a festive Chinese meal, while she relaxes in Waikanae with her parents.

There has been no family break-up - it will just be easier that way. The six-day trip wouldn't fit with her teenage daughters' summer jobs and New Year plans, so she decided to make the trip alone.

"It just wasn't feasible," Jenkins says. "I could have made everybody come, and I would have had an awful time because everyone would have been moaning."

It's not the first time the family has bucked tradition: last year their Christmas dinner was at the local Chinese restaurant: "It was lovely, I didn't have to cook or wash up.

"So many families don't have a good time, they go for lunch with one family, then dash off to another dinner, and I've decided I don't want a bar of it."

For a season of peace and goodwill, Christmas comes with a rigid set of rules.

All families have their own long-held traditions, and breaking them sometimes means picking through a minefield of politics and expectations.

Who do we buy presents for? How much do we spend? Traditional Christmas dinner or barbecue? Which grandparents should we invite?

Our lives have changed, and maybe it's time for Christmas to change, too, says personal coach Janice Davies.

"For people in my age group, our mothers were at home and not working, but today most mums are either part-time or full-time workers.

"Families expect them to carry on the traditions, but society has changed."

Last year, the adults in her family each bought a $20 gift to put under the tree. They all took turns to open one randomly, then swapped and bargained for their top choice.

"It was doing something a little bit differently, and I'm hearing that other people are doing things like that, too."

PENNY DE BORST and her husband Igor added up their Christmas list a few years ago and realised they were buying presents for 38 people.

"Now we only buy for one person in each family, and in my mum's family we give everyone a list of things that we want," the Wellington radio sales manager says. "We spend up to $100, and that's it."

That's becoming the norm, says Tina Jones, owner of online gift and homewares store Design Boutique. "More than ever families are putting names in the hat and choosing one person to spend a certain amount, and it's usually in the region of up to $50."

Christmas will be all about children this year for TV3 sports presenter Shaun Summerfield and his family. With 2-year-old Emily and - depending on arrival date - a new baby to focus on, he and wife Caroline have agreed not to buy each other gifts.

It's a promise he's unlikely to keep: "One or two days before Christmas, when the Christmas spirit hits me, I can't help myself."

As a child, Summerfield remembers waking on Christmas morning to not just a stocking, but a bulging pillowcase full of goodies.

One year, Santa deposited a Raleigh 20 bike and a shiny BMX for his brother under the tree. Jealous of his sibling's gift, 8-year-old Summerfield got up early and swapped the bikes.

"I honestly believed it when my parents said Santa told them I'd switched them," he says.

Now he sets a $20 present limit with family members, and tries to keep the focus on the kids.

Though, as Police Ten 7 frontman Graham Bell can attest, children's presents have their own pitfalls.

One Christmas, his parents visited with gifts for their three grandchildren. They were the toys every parent dreads: "Trumpets, drums and other cacophonous delights," Bell says.

Tables turned when the grandparents took the children home to Hamilton with a "terrible orchestra" playing in the back seat.

FOR SOME, the solution to Christmas stress is avoiding festivities in favour of a tropical getaway.

Demand for last-minute escapes to Australia and the Pacific Islands was so high this year Flight Centre put together a special Christmas break campaign, says public relations manager Marie Pilkington.

"We've seen a huge range of people, lots of empty-nesters where perhaps the kids are on their OEs, or families who have moved here from overseas and don't have extended family here."

For Summerfield, however, the special thing about this Christmas will be spending the day with family - he has the day off for only the second time in 10 years.

"The best thing about Christmas Day is it's like Sundays used to be," he says. "People actually stop."