Breaking Away

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Made your Christmas plans yet? Even this far ahead, the question may send a jolt of anxiety through you as visions of frantic shopping, decorating, cooking and family frictions dance in your head. But Jane Parrish, 41, of North Salem, N.Y., isn't worried. Jane, her husband Mike, 45, and their three kids are looking forward this year to a major departure from stressful Christmases past. They will spend the holiday at Kay El Bar, a 79-year-old dude ranch in Wickenburg, Ariz. They will take a leisurely Christmas-morning horseback ride through the Sonoran Desert, followed by a midafternoon traditional feast in the lodge. By nightfall, as the desert air turns frosty, the family will sit in the communal living room in front of a crackling fire and ornament-laden tree, playing board games or reading books. "I love the idea of actually enjoying the holiday season," Jane says, "rather than merely enduring it."

Though plenty of baby boomers still strive, with varying success, to enact a Norman Rockwell image of holiday celebrations, a growing number have decided to make a change. "Boomers are increasingly looking to holidays for a little R. and R.," says Peter Yesawich, a boomer and chairman of Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell, a marketing firm that specializes in the travel industry. "As one of the most time-impoverished groups--with careers, kids and aging parents--they look at holidays as one of the few times they can enjoy the family while escaping the demands of their jobs."

The new holiday festivities are often the brainchildren of professional women who in midlife are tired of doing weeks of work for minutes of pleasure (or pain). "Most boomer women were raised with traditional holiday celebrations," says Dotsie Bregel, founder of www.boomerwomenspeak.com a website in which women of a certain age share experiences and concerns. "They continued the traditions until their kids got older. Then, unlike their mothers, many said, 'What about me?'"

Miriam Friend, 57, counts herself in that group. "Until 10 years ago, I did all the traditional stuff at Passover," says Friend, of Staten Island, N.Y., "but my husband Abraham and I decided we needed a break from cleaning and cooking for the whole family." Off the couple went to the spa/resort Canyon Ranch in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts for the first of several Passover visits. At Canyon Ranch, a rabbi presides over the seder, and Miriam lights the candles. The meal is the usual--matzo-ball soup, gefilte fish, brisket--minus the high fat content. The rest of the holiday is spent hiking, working out, playing Wallyball and then luxuriating in the Jacuzzi, on the massage table or in a facial chair. "We come home totally relaxed," Friend says.

Many boomers switch their customs because they don't want to repeat the angst-filled holidays of their childhood. "In the past 20 years," says psychologist Marilyn J. Sorenson, author of Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem, "as boomers have moved into midlife, they no longer feel they have to do what doesn't feel right." As a 57-year-old mother succinctly puts it, "I no longer want to do the impossible for the ungrateful."