The Holiday Season and Disciplinary Spankings (The Club - Meeting 536)

“What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.” - Phyllis Diller

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship.

I hope you all had a good week and, for those of you in the U.S., a happy Thanksgiving.  Ours was pretty chill, but not necessarily in a good way.  I’m still laid up and under significant activity constraints. I’m not banned from travel or longer car trips, but it’s not very practical right now either.  One of my siblings had a major surgery the same week I had my less major one. Although I got to see both kids, they work both work in professions in which they have rotating holiday coverage responsibilities.  All that meant no extended family gatherings and only a scaled-down immediate family get-together.

 

Anne and I did get the house mostly decorated for the Christmas season, and I managed to contribute at least a little, while listening to Christmas music. 

 

I started feeling at least a few glimmerings of holiday spirit, even though this one is, in many ways, more challenging than most. 

 

As much as I love this season (and, I really do have a thing for Christmas in general), it does tend to be challenging, doesn’t it?  At least that seems to be the conventional wisdom.  And, despite my love for the season, in the past it is fair to say that it seem to involve concentrated periods of bad behavior, resulting in more spankings than is our norm.

 

For me, it’s definitely not about generalized holiday stress.  As I said, I really like Christmas, including believe it or not, gift shopping, which I know contributes to some people’s stress.

 

 

Back when I was working, holiday parties were a big contributor to my bad behavior.  My firm usually had a big, somewhat swanky, very boozy holiday party. Anne’s workgroup usually had some kind of potluck.  And, work and social friends hosted their own gatherings.

 

It seems like that source of both holiday merriment and holiday stress has really tapered down since with both retired.  To the point that, despite my introverted proclivities and the fact that we’ve never been big party hosters, I’ve been thinking maybe we need to start our own holiday party tradition. Although holiday party season definitely was contributor to both bad behavior and stress, I feel like it’s tapered a little too much.

 

 

Others get in trouble for family arguments, particularly about politics, which seems to be part and parcel of holiday gatherings.  Based on the comments last week, a few of you are already off to a bad start on that score.

 

I’m sure DD couples have different ways of dealing with holiday stress and gatherings and the tendency for some of us to behave worse or let our bad attitudes get the better of us during this season.

 

Although there wasn’t a huge difference, I think Anne did sometimes cut me some slack over the holidays, recognizing that it wasn’t entirely my fault that I’d give into temptation when there was just so much of it around the holidays.  It was also the case that some of the parties where I was most prone to over-indulging were given by her boozy friends.

 

Yet, probably because there were so many opportunities for misbehavior, the number of spankings I received would spike over the holidays and usually go down as I started working on those resolutions in January.  And, Anne’s tolerance definitely knew some limits, and I myself generally recognized that the fact that there were so many temptations probably suggested there should be more strict guardrails, not less.

 

 

There also were a handful of times we experimented with “preventative” spankings during this period.  In the early days of this blog, I wasn’t wild about the whole concept of preventative spankings. I felt like a spanking couldn’t really be about accountability or punishment if it preceded any bad behavior.

 

However, I’ve come around on that point.  I now recognize that preventative spankings do modify our behavior, and that’s really the entire goal of Domestic Discipline.  Also, it’s not like preventative spankings are gratuitous or random.  Rather, they are generally used in situations that have proven, time and time again, to present an elevated risk of bad behavior.

 

 

How do the holidays affect your Domestic Discipline relationship?  Do you misbehave more often?  If so, give us some specifics.  In what specific ways does your behavior deteriorate?  Over-indulging in alcohol?  If so, is it a problem in and of itself, or is it that it encourages you to say or do things you shouldn’t?

 

Or, is it more about general attitude problems than about bad behavior?

 

 

Where is the misbehavior most likely to happen?  Office parties?  Parties with friends?  Family gatherings?  Shopping excursions?  During holiday travel?

 

How are the behavior or attitude problems dealt with?  Are you cut some slack, given that the sheer number of parties and stressors might lead anyone to misbehave more than usual? Or, are the holidays treated with increased strictness and severity? 

 

How would you like them to be dealt with? Do you think your wife should cut you some slack in the name of holiday cheer? Or, do you think she should tighten the reins so you’re less likely to misbehave or let a bad attitude spiral?  From some of the comments last week, it seems like attitude problems do proliferate around the holidays.  What is your wife's approach to generally bad attitude issues during the holidays?  Does she take a tough line, or does attitude in the absence of other bad behavior tend to go unpunished?

Don’t feel confined to this specific set of questions.  Talk to us in general about how the holiday season influences your DD regimen or how you think holiday misbehavior should be dealt with or prevented.  Also, please share any especially memorable holiday fails and the associated discipline you received, or should have received.

 

Have a great week.