Celebrating Christmas with Seniors

Celebrating Christmas with seniors has a special charm to it. The elder members of your family bring cherished traditions and stories of holidays come to pass. They share their recipes, their decorating hacks, and imbue a sense of warmth across the whole season.

Why is the holiday season so important for seniors?

The holiday season is great fun for most individuals, but it is especially important for many seniors. While the many commitments associated with the season can be quite exhausting, the holiday season gives seniors the opportunity to spend time with family members they don’t often see. This helps reduce loneliness, which can run rampant during the winter months.

Companionship is shown to not only improve mood but improve cognition in older adults. In addition to brain health, spending time with the younger generations of the family can give seniors a sense of purpose. When certain things, like cooking and cleaning, grow to be physically taxing, this renewed sense of purpose is especially valuable.

With all this being said, celebrating Christmas with seniors brings its challenges. Health concerns might change how the holiday is celebrated, but that is okay. All it does is make room for new memories.

The best ways to celebrate Christmas with seniors

The primary thing to remember when celebrating the holiday with seniors is the importance of inclusion. Give your elderly loved one plenty of opportunities to feel involved in an especially fulfilling holiday for both of you.

Cook together

Delicious sweets and large meals go hand-in-hand with Christmas time. So, bring your senior loved one into the kitchen to help with your festive meals or your favorite family recipes. One great activity that gets the whole family in the kitchen is baking and decorating sugar cookies. All ages enjoy flexing their creativity and eating sweet holiday treats.

Encourage seniors to share family recipes and holiday traditions, and pass them down to younger generations. If cooking the meal itself is too tiring, they can guide you through the various steps of the recipe. This time shared is great for bonding.

Create seasonal crafts

Crafting gets you away from screens and working with your hands—which is great for cognitive exercise and hand-eye coordination in seniors. It’s fun to see how the rest of the family and friends interpret the same craft differently. Once you’ve all completed your décor pieces, you can display them in the same location, or take them home as a keepsake.

If you’re looking for some ideas for seasonal crafts, you’re in luck. Our recent blog post on Great Christmas Crafts for Seniors can offer you some easy ideas the whole family will enjoy.

Make a gingerbread house

Making a gingerbread house falls somewhere between the first two activity suggestions. Gather the whole family around the dining table to put together a house made of gingerbread, royal icing, and candy. Just be mindful of the fact that to have a sturdy home, you’ll have to exercise a great deal of patience!

For the ease of everyone, head to your local grocery store to pick up a kit. Unless you have some serious baking skills, making gingerbread from scratch that will work for a home is quite difficult. Save yourself the trouble and go store-bought.

Enjoy your favorite holiday music

Christmas is one of the few holidays that has a great deal of beautiful holiday tunes associated with it. Put on some of your elderly loved one’s favorite Christmas songs and listen to them together. They can share their memories associated with it, or simply sing along. Read our blog to learn about 5 Amazing Benefits of Music for Older Adults.

Make more of an event out of it by turning your listening session into Christmas karaoke. You don’t need a machine—just pull up YouTube on your television and look up karaoke for Christmas songs. There, you’ll find hundreds of options to sing along to.

Play games by the fire

When you’ve completed opening your presents and enjoying your holiday meal, settle down by the Christmas tree or the fireplace to play some board games. Board games are a great way to stimulate your loved one’s mind while having fun. Play some music in the background and place a platter of cookies in the center of the table for an extra holiday flare.

Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Uno are family favorites for a reason. However, enjoying a game together will be less about the game itself, and more about spending quality time together. As long as you have fun, that makes all the difference.

An at-home caregiver can help your loved one this holiday season

With so many obligations throughout the holiday season, taking care of one’s personal needs can be twice as difficult for seniors. An at-home caregiver can help take care of their activities of daily living so they can focus on what is most important to them.

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