Holiday Stress: Why Americans Dread Grief and Koreans Dread the Kitchen

America measures its holiday stress annually, through a medical society. In the American Psychiatric Association's 2025 poll, 41 percent of adults expected the holidays to be more stressful than the year before, a jump from 28 percent in 2024 and 29 percent in 2023, with adults 18 to 34 far above those 65 and over (49 versus 27 percent). The same poll carried a countercurrent that must travel with that number: 44 percent said the holidays affect their mental health positively, itself up from 38 percent in each of the two prior years. Stress expectations and positive ratings rose together; quoting one without the other distorts the picture.

The content of the worry is what separates America from Korea. The most anticipated part of the season is seeing family and friends (61 percent), followed by good food (53) and gifts (31). Yet the top worry is missing someone or grieving, at 48 percent, with gift costs at 46. The 2024 wave read the same way: loss and missing someone at 47 percent, gift spending at 46, difficult family relationships at 35. Where a family or partner relationship has gone past friction into a pattern of control, some countries treat the pattern itself as the offense: England and Wales made repeated or continuous controlling behaviour a crime in 2015, and none of these laws asks whether the person doing it has a diagnosis. Even in an election year, worry about discussing politics with family held flat at 23 percent. The season that gathers everyone is also the season that makes absences loudest, and that ache sits beside the wallet on the worry list.

Korea's coordinates can be drawn with numbers. In Hankook Research's survey for the 2026 Lunar New Year, 35 percent planned to hold the ancestral rite. Among respondents under 40, 54 percent said they would skip visiting relatives and rest quietly, the only age group past half. The rites are receding, and half of the young are opting out of the gathering altogether.

Who recommended the simplification is the twist. A Confucian rites organization, through a standard model for the holiday table, declared that laying oil-fried foods on the rite table runs against protocol and recommended a simpler table of rice-cake soup and fruit. The guardians of the tradition were the ones trimming it. Holiday advice that ends with "let's simplify the rites" is repeating a conclusion that already arrived.

What remains is not liturgy but labor. The public health center's account of physical holiday stress names long drives and food preparation, and a simpler table does not answer the question of who does the preparing. The gender distribution of that labor is a question this article cannot answer with verified statistics, and it declines to pin the burden on any family role without them.

The direction of change is itself on the public record: the same center notes that practices for cutting the physical toll of the holiday are spreading. The holiday is being redesigned, and the redesign aims precisely at the documented sources of its stress. What belongs on that list is gathered below.

What can be adjusted before the holiday

These items were scattered through the article; this is them in one place. Nothing new is being recommended, and every line comes from a source already cited above.

• Visiting family graves in advance. Korea's National Center for Mental Health notes a spreading practice of making the grave visit before the holiday itself, to cut the physical toll.
• Cooking less. The same material notes the trend of simplifying holiday food preparation. Since the physical stress it names comes from long drives and food preparation, reducing the amount of cooking aims straight at that source.
• Fewer dishes on the rite table. The Confucian rites organization's standard model held that oil-fried offerings run against protocol and recommended a simpler table of rice-cake soup and fruit. Some of what survives in tradition's name is not required even by tradition's own standard.
• Adjusting the size and shape of the gathering. Among Koreans under 40, 54 percent chose to skip visiting relatives and rest quietly. Resizing the gathering touches both of the stress sources the center describes separately: the preparation labor and the inflated family expectations.

All four are decided before the holiday, not on the day. And the list comes only from the Korean material. What the American polling supplied is the content of the worry; this article does not convert unverified material into a to-do list.

If your version of the season is spent travelling alone rather than at a family table, the preparation that matters there is institutional rather than personal: an advisory level is information, while registering with your own government is the connection that actually reaches you after you arrive.