For the most part, the holiday season is filled with fun and festive gatherings where you get to reconnect with family and friends. It’s a time of year many of us look forward to anxiously with hopes that we will make new memories.

However, this can also be a stressful time of year as social gatherings can bring together a mix of personalities and generations. If you want to set yourself up for the best chance of enjoying a fun and joyful holiday season, start with these six tips.

1. Set your expectations

Foremost, you want to be sure you have the right expectations for your various holiday gatherings. There will be some occasions that are lively and fast-paced. Other holiday events may cater to a more low-key audience. Think about the different members of your family and whether or not that is an ideal social gathering for them. Different ages and personalities will impact the types of holiday gatherings that are best suited for each person

2. Have planned activities

To prevent family holiday parties from getting stagnant or boring, it’s a smart idea to plan a few activities in advance. Particularly, you want to select activities which will be fun for different generations. When your holiday gathering is structured by a few activities, you’ll be able to keep guests entertained while creating fun and lasting memories.

3. Switch things up

When it comes to holiday parties, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. However, if you have found that people are growing a little tired of the same gathering at the same location year after year, it may be time to switch things up. Also, your family’s needs may have changed, meaning you require more space or a location that is conducive to wheelchairs, etc. Consider hosting the event at someone else’s house or a different venue altogether. You can also expand your guest list and encourage people to invite a new friend or two to join the fun.

4. Schedule downtime

This holiday season, it may feel like you’re jumping from one celebration to the next, but be sure to schedule downtime in between your family gatherings. Especially for your aging loved ones, it’s so important to not overload them with too many events. Though it might be manageable for you, remember that they may have a lower tolerance for travel and social engagements, making it important to prioritize downtime.

5. Choose the gatherings that are most meaningful/enjoyable

For the holiday gatherings you do to choose attend as a whole family, focus on the ones that are most meaningful and enjoyable. These might include events with out-of-town relatives you haven’t seen in a while. Or you might simply choose the events that you most look forward to attending or that are most convenient for your family. No matter your reasoning, it’s perfectly fine to limit your holiday obligations.

6. Know when to say no

And finally, you must learn to say no. This is a hard one for most of us, particularly because it’s easy to see every holiday gathering as a special opportunity to spend with family and friends, old and new. However, you will exhaust yourself trying to do it all and this will lead to a negative impact on your holiday experience. Simply put, you must know when to say no – and be okay with it!

With the holidays right around the corner, we hope that this advice will help you make the time spent with family more fun and joyful!

For the most part, technology serves to make our lives easier, keep us safer and enhance our overall quality of life. However, we must always remain diligent about the types of technology we use and how much information we give away when we use it.

For our aging population in particular, it’s easy to fall victim to the wrong types of technology. In certain circumstances, technology can create confusion, roadblocks and safety concerns. Take a look at three instances when technology could have a negative impact on our aging loved ones.

It creates more complication than convenience.

The use of technology for seniors can turn sour when it creates more complication than convenience. Technology should be used to streamline tasks and add efficiency, but that is not always the case. For example, there are apps available that allow seniors to track and manage their prescriptions. When it works, it’s wonderful! However, if your aging loved one is confused as to how to access this app and interpret its information, it can be more harmful than helpful. In this instance, simple handwritten notes would be better than asking someone to rely upon technology they can’t easily access and understand.

It requires private or personal information to be shared.

Technology can also be a risk to our aging population when it requires private or personal information to be shared. Apps that manage money or bank accounts are extremely susceptible to fraud or misuse. It’s an easy target for hackers and once that information is leaked it can cause a whole host of other problems and concerns.

And it’s not just professional hackers that you need to worry about. When you aging loved one stores their most valuable information in one space, it can be misused by the people who are closest to them who know how to access that information and misuse it. The key is to be sure you’re only using technology that has the highest safeguards, and also be sure it is protected with a strong password that only trustworthy people are able to access.

It exploits a users’ trust.

Finally, technology can be a risk to seniors when it aims to exploit trust. In general, the aging population can find it increasingly difficult to discern who they can and cannot trust. This is what often leads them to fall victim to internet and phone scams. Scams can also come in the form of other technology as well, like websites and apps. Your aging loved one may think they are playing a safe and harmless game on their iPad only to be presented with the request for their credit card information or social security number. If you’re not there to advise them otherwise, they may mistakenly hand over this confidential information into the hands of someone who aims to misuse it.

Most importantly, keep your aging loved one safe by frequently checking their technology use and assessing it for these possible risks. The more you know, the more you can prevent!