The holiday season arrives each year with the same contradictions joyful yet stressful, celebratory yet exhausting, meaningful yet overwhelming. For many, the gap between the idealized holiday vision and lived reality creates disappointment, loneliness, or financial strain.
Mattese Lecque understands these holiday complexities intimately. As a retired Major with the United States Army Reserves, she spent many holidays away from family, serving her nation. As a healthcare professional and Physician’s Assistant, she witnessed how seasonal stress impacts physical and mental health. As someone who has experienced profound loss, she knows that holidays can amplify grief as much as joy.
Through Mattese’s eyes, the holiday season transforms from a pressure-filled performance into an opportunity for authentic connection, meaningful reflection, and renewed purpose. Her perspective offers practical wisdom for navigating this complex time with faith, resilience, and grace.
The Holiday Reality Check
Before we can navigate the holiday season meaningfully, we must acknowledge the stark reality behind the glossy advertisements and social media perfection.
Financial Pressure
The expectation to spend lavishly on gifts, decorations, travel, and entertaining creates financial stress that lingers long after decorations come down. Many people start the new year buried in debt from trying to meet unrealistic holiday expectations.
Mattese’s practical wisdom reminds us that it doesn’t matter if you were born with nothing or what resources you have meaningful holidays aren’t purchased. The most memorable moments rarely involve expensive gifts but authentic connection and genuine presence.
Emotional Challenges
For those navigating grief, the holidays intensify loss. Empty chairs at holiday tables, traditions that can no longer be shared, and the pressure to be joyful when you’re heartbroken create emotional landmines throughout the season.
Mattese emphasizes the process of grief and how to not succumb to depression. She teaches that you can honor both your loss and the season, acknowledging pain while still creating meaning.
Family Dynamics
Holiday gatherings often surface family tensions, unresolved conflicts, and painful dynamics. The expectation of perfect family harmony crashes against the reality of complicated relationships, different values, and old wounds.
Her military and healthcare background taught Mattese about navigating difficult relationships with both boundaries and grace lessons particularly valuable during family-intensive holidays.
Seasonal Isolation
While images of holiday togetherness fill our screens, many people face the season alone. Whether due to geographic distance, estranged relationships, loss, or life circumstances, holiday isolation intensifies loneliness and can trigger depression.
Mattese’s Framework: Faith-Centered Holidays
What distinguishes Mattese Lecque’s approach to the holiday season is her unwavering faith foundation. Her book “You Can’t Make Me Doubt Him” reveals how spiritual belief transforms every aspect of life including how we navigate the holidays.
Remember the Reason
In the rush of shopping, decorating, and entertaining, the spiritual significance of holidays often gets buried. Mattese calls us back to remembering why we celebrate. For Christmas, it’s not about perfect gifts but celebrating the ultimate gift. For Thanksgiving, it’s not about the meal but genuine gratitude.
This spiritual grounding provides perspective when holiday stress threatens to overwhelm. When you remember the deeper meaning, the surface pressures lose their power.
Practice Gratitude
Mattese’s military service taught her gratitude lessons many people never learn. When you’ve served in challenging conditions away from family, you gain profound appreciation for simple blessings others take for granted.
The holiday season offers perfect opportunity to practice intentional gratitude. Not the performative thankfulness of social media posts, but genuine appreciation for what you have, who loves you, and how you’ve grown through challenges.
Serve Others
As an active member of Saint Peter’s AME Church in North Charleston and through her numerous community leadership roles, Mattese embodies the truth that serving others during the holidays transforms the season from self-focused stress to purpose-driven joy.
When you volunteer at soup kitchens, donate to those in need, visit the lonely, or use your resources to bless others, you tap into the true holiday spirit. Service shifts focus from what you lack to what you can give.
Practical Wisdom for Holiday Navigation
Mattese’s life experience offers practical strategies for navigating holiday challenges with resilience and grace.
Set Realistic Expectations
Stop comparing your reality to Instagram images or childhood memories. Create holidays that fit your current circumstances, resources, and energy. Permission to celebrate imperfectly is the gift you give yourself.
Her message that you can overcome obstacles applies perfectly to holidays. The “perfect” holiday doesn’t exist, but meaningful connection, authentic joy, and renewed faith certainly do.
Establish Boundaries
You cannot attend every event, buy every gift, or please every person. Healthy boundaries protect your wellbeing, finances, and energy. Say no to obligations that deplete without replenishing. Say yes to what aligns with your values and brings genuine joy.
Mattese’s military leadership experience taught her that effective leaders establish clear boundaries. Apply this wisdom to your holiday commitments.
Create Meaningful Traditions
Rather than exhausting yourself maintaining traditions that no longer serve you, create new ones that reflect your current values and circumstances. Mattese’s emphasis on re-imagining and recreating yourself extends to holiday traditions.
Whether that means simplified gift-giving, service-focused celebrations, or intimate gatherings instead of large parties, honor what brings genuine meaning to your life.
Honor Your Grief
If you’re navigating holidays after loss, give yourself permission to grieve. You don’t have to pretend joy you don’t feel. Mattese teaches about fueling your life with things that may leave a legacy on your behalf and the deceased one this includes honoring them during holidays.
Light a candle in their memory. Share stories about them. Include their favorite traditions. Make space for both tears and laughter.
Prioritize Wellbeing
Mattese’s healthcare background reinforces that physical and emotional wellbeing must be protected during holiday stress. Maintain healthy routines as much as possible. Get adequate sleep. Move your body. Eat nourishing food alongside holiday treats. Take breaks when overwhelmed.
You cannot pour from an empty cup. Self-care isn’t selfish it’s essential for showing up fully for people and purposes that matter.
The Legacy of Your Holidays
Mattese’s focus on legacy provides powerful framework for holiday decision-making. Years from now, what do you want people to remember about holidays with you?
Not the perfectly decorated house or expensive gifts, but your presence, your love, your generosity, your faith, and your ability to create meaningful moments amid imperfection.
When you approach holidays through the legacy lens, priorities clarify. You invest energy in what matters long-term and release what doesn’t. You create memories that endure rather than stress that depletes.
Teaching the Next Generation
Through her work as Chairperson of the Burke Foundation for Student Enrichment and Mentoring and Treasurer of the North Charleston High School PTSA, Mattese demonstrates commitment to shaping future generations. Holidays offer powerful teaching opportunities.
Children learn from how you handle stress, express gratitude, serve others, manage finances, honor faith, and create meaning. Your holiday choices teach values more powerfully than any lecture.
Model the holidays you hope they’ll create in their own lives grounded in faith, focused on people over things, generous toward others, resilient through challenges, and authentic rather than performative.
Holidays as Transformation Opportunity
Mattese’s memoir “The Make-Over: Re-imagining & Recreating Myself” demonstrates that transformation happens when we courageously examine our lives and make intentional changes. The holiday season, despite its challenges, offers transformation opportunity.
Use this season to examine what’s working and what isn’t. Where are you depleting yourself trying to meet others’ expectations? Where have you lost sight of deeper meaning in pursuit of surface perfection? What changes would create more authentic joy and connection?
The new year doesn’t have to be the only time for fresh starts. Holiday season itself can be your re-imagining moment the time you decide to celebrate differently, more meaningfully, more sustainably.
A Holiday Prayer from Mattese’s Perspective
As someone whose faith sustains her through every challenge, Mattese would likely encourage a simple holiday prayer:
Help me remember what truly matters. Give me wisdom to say yes to what brings meaning and no to what depletes. Strengthen me to navigate grief with grace, serve others with joy, and create holidays that honor both my values and my circumstances. When I’m overwhelmed, remind me that I can overcome. When I’m lonely, help me reach out. When I’m grateful, help me express it. Let this season reflect not perfection but authentic faith, genuine love, and lasting legacy.
Conclusion: Your Holiday, Your Way
The holiday season by Mattese Lecque isn’t about following prescribed formulas or meeting external expectations. It’s about navigating this complex season with faith as your foundation, resilience as your strength, and legacy as your compass.
You can overcome holiday challenges. You can create meaningful celebrations despite limitations. You can honor both joy and grief. You can establish boundaries that protect your wellbeing. You can serve others while caring for yourself. You can build traditions that reflect your authentic values.
This holiday season, give yourself permission to celebrate imperfectly, grieve honestly, give generously, rest adequately, and focus on what truly matters faith, family, service, and the legacy you’re building through every choice you make.
As Mattese has demonstrated through military service, healthcare career, community leadership, and personal transformation, you have everything you need to navigate this season with grace. The question isn’t whether you can handle the holidays, but whether you’ll approach them with the faith, wisdom, and courage that transforms obligation into opportunity.
