This weekend, my daughters and I made our graham-cracker houses. As I write about in Happier at Home, every year, instead of traditional gingerbread houses, we make graham cracker houses, which are easier to build and decorate.

Every year — this also seems to be part of the tradition — I almost forget to organize the house-building, until it’s almost too late. But we’ve always managed to do it.

I learned how to make graham-cracker houses when my older daughter was in kindergarten; I was a parent helper when the children made them as part of a unit on “home.” (Coincidence? Or not?)

For me, one of the most important aspects of home is the celebration of traditions — like the building of these houses. Family traditions mark time in a happy way and give a sense both of anticipation and continuity.

How are we expected to move on with our lives, with holiday shopping, meal planning, cookie baking and parties after what happened in Newtown, Conn. on Dec. 14, 2012?

On the day of the shooting I went to two holiday parties where everyone carefully avoided talking about what happened just hours earlier. It was weird and a relief at the same time.

Someone wrote that even those of us far away from the incident still may need to go through the five stages of grief as described by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

The day it happened, as we discovered the horror, many of us clung to the denial and bargaining phases. We did not want to believe we were all so vulnerable and made up reasons to avoid going there. Some just went straight to anger, even depression. None of us was ready for acceptance.

It is increasingly apparent that the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy has ripped open a deep wound in the American heart — particularly for parents of kids with mental health challenges.

Unlike the aftermath of other, similar tragedies, it seems that no amount of conversation, in person or online, helps ease the pain we’re feeling about the events in Newtown, Conn. on Dec. 14, 2012.

No doubt part of our shock and sorrow has to do with the ages of those gunned down, and the accumulated trauma from the sheer number of previous school shootings. But I believe there’s much more going on here. The children who died as a result of Adam Lanza’s bullets and his apparent mental illness may not have been our own flesh and blood, but the agony of saying goodbye to them has become a shared experience filled with equal parts grief and survivors’ guilt.

“I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things.”

Those words were not written by Adam Lanza, but another school shooter, Eric Harris, whose life was also wrought with themes of alienation and social awkwardness. Eric Harris, a Columbine shooter, compiled journal entries that pulsate with narcissistic rage and reveal a tendency to rely upon the psychological strategy of splitting: separating the world into black or white, weak or strong, good or bad, me or them.

Splitting can be seen in certain personality disorders and might also be used by some to justify bullying someone, starting a militia or cult, deciding to home-school a child, maintaining a survivalist mentality or even getting a divorce. Extreme cases of splitting can even contribute to rationalizing suicide or murder.

Isn’t anywhere safe anymore?

You can send your kids off to the movies — and they may get shot. Or they might go to hang out at the mall — and risk getting shot. Or to high school or college — where they might get shot. Kids get kidnapped on their way home from school and abducted out of their beds.

Now 20 first graders have been gunned down in their first grade classrooms.

In the last few years, our national sense of safety has been repeatedly shaken. We can’t take it for granted that when innocent kids do innocent, everyday things, they will risk nothing more than a belly ache from eating too much popcorn or an argument with a friend.

With every Christmas and holiday season, we find ourselves repeating the same old patterns, year after year.

You read well-intended columns, much like this one, that suggest, “Just don’t do this” and you’ll be fine. Of course, if all it took was pure will-power, I’d suspect there’d be a lot less need for therapists.

So instead of telling you things you should or shouldn’t do, I’m going to suggest some simple strategies for actually sticking to those other lists.

Recently, my daughter turned 4 years old. I …

Around the holidays, therapists hear their clients voice versions …

Ah, the holidays: Candy canes, cozy slippers, festive lights, family peace, marital joy, and grateful children.

Or not.

The holidays are stressful. There are the challenges of too much family, not enough family, not enough money, continual exposure to food and alcohol, and perhaps worst of all, the gap between our actual life and our fantasy life. As if gazing into the perfect happy scene within a snowglobe, we might fall into a trance of how our life should be.

We might feel torn apart by nostalgia and grief over the good times and good people of the past, and wracked with guilt and inadequacy for failing to create a more wonderful life for ourselves. We might feel scared about our dissatisfaction and hypnotized by the promise of fulfillment just beyond the hard glass.

Addictive and codependent behaviors thrive during this season of fantasy.

Traditions are the foundations of the holidays. They cultivate bonds between families and friends. They make great memories. And, even if they’re ridiculous, they make for great stories (and hilarious pictures, no doubt).

Traditions are as unique as the families they originate from. For instance, every New Year’s Eve, my family cuts loose to old school Russian music, eats lots of European cuisine and exchanges presents at midnight. When my father was alive, every Hanukkah, we’d blast the Barry sisters, use the living room as a dance floor, and only take breaks for bites of potato latkes.

With the holidays in full swing, we wanted to know how therapists celebrate the season. Below, in this month’s Therapists Spill piece — a regular series that gives readers a glimpse into practitioners’ personal and professional lives — clinicians reveal their favorite rituals below.

It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year — but not if negative emotions take hold of your holidays. So let’s be honest. The holidays are packed with stress, and therefore provoke tons of depression and anxiety.

But there is hope. Whether I’m fretting about something as trite as stocking stuffers or as complicated as managing difficult family relationships, I apply a few rules that I’ve learned over the years.

These 9 rules help me put the joy back into the festivities — or at least keep me from hurling a mistletoe at Santa and landing myself on the “naughty” list.

The pursuit of love and money may be universal, but it can be rare to find both, and rarer still for the two to coexist in harmony. After all, losing money for love and vice versa is the stuff of great stories because almost all of us can relate.

One of the most common of these stories is the sometimes-tragedy of divorce, in which a happy union is marred and ultimately ruined by the couple’s inability to communicate and jointly manage money matters.

As with most things in life, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To prevent misunderstandings over money or its mismanagement from ruining your marriage, having “the money talk” is essential.