Every year I approach the holiday season with trepidation. I have this feeling that settles in like I have been here before and have never been here at all. Mostly because each holiday season is different. Yearly my mental health toolkit acquires more tools on how I can cope with the month of December, but it’s any one’s guess if the old tools will work.

The one hack that has never failed me during the winter holidays, death anniversaries, or other hard grief day is this — make plans you can break.

One of my cousins has this personal tradition that to me always seemed revolutionary — every holiday season she buys a gift for herself. Wild.

Coming from a family that’s so centered on others and never coming in contact with the concept of self-care until I was much older, she was my prime example of how happy it could make you to give yourself a gift. Once I started having more room in my disposable income to treat myself during the holiday season, I took my cousin’s tradition and made it my own.

Gift guides during the holidays lean more towards what you can gift others in your life, below you’ll find a list of wellness products or other suggested acts of self-care that can help round out your own holiday self-care plan.

The first time I noticed that “my holidays” were different from “the holidays” or “their holidays” was May 2003. It was my first Mother’s Day without my mom. In class, we were given the assignment to create Mother’s Day cards to give our moms that weekend. My mom’s death was fresh, she’d been gone 4 months at that point, and saying, “Hey, I don’t think I can do that,” didn’t fit into my 10-year-old lexicon, so I did it.