1. Preparation is important!

This holiday season, as the last vestiges of the modern monetary system come unraveled at the seams, it is important not to procrastinate with your holiday plans. The disappointment of your family members will be revealed on their sad, plaintive faces as the hordes of scavengers half-mad with hunger clamber through your broken windows and woefully unreinforced doors.

Gather your mate and spawn in a central and easily guarded area of your domocile, and barricade all unguarded entry points. You will need nails and wood, and a number of weapons. Do not let the children play with the weapons in their idle time. If the children become excessively disappointed with your holiday plans, they may try to violently usurp you. Keep an eye on them, and do not let them invent their own private language. Keep them placated with shiny objects and false hopes for a non-bleak future. Tell them fanciful stories and make them your friends. Their nimbleness, agility, and compact size will be useful assets during foraging and raiding runs. They can also be traded for necessities, but do not use this possibility as a threat to keep them in line, for this may incite that bloody usurpation previously mentioned.

2. Embrace What This Season Is Truly About

As a fun change of pace, we suggest forsaking your current and failed religion, and implementing a family return to the Old Ways. The facade of modern adulterated religion has crumbled like the crust of a Dutch Apple pie. Hidden in the filling are the Old Gods, and the Old Gods will help you, though for such results they will of course demand a sacrifice. Several sacrifices. Capture a disliked neighbor and appease your deities with his dismemberment on the dining room table. This can be done as a family project or a Paternal Display of Power. Afterward you and your clan may enjoy the wonderful cause-and-effect that worshiping the Old Gods will deliver. Your backyard crops will be plentiful, and your enemies will tremble as your horse-drawn SUV appears on the horizon, your gift baskets of Chaos and Despair raining down from above as your nimble children joyfully skip forth with steel baseball bats and kitchen knives, eager to share the tenets of your new and family-specific religion, so very much superior to all others.

3. Remember Those That Have Less Than Yourself

In particular, remember where they live. They will be desperate, and may even welcome your family as friends. Maintain civility until the moment to strike arises. Wear loose rags to conceal your weapons. Bring brownies or, in a pinch, mud shaped to look like brownies. Tell the children to bide their time, and to smile in a non-sinister fashion. Prepare several engaging stories that don't involve ritual murder. Rehearse a grandiose lie with your family involving a nearby enclave of civilized agrarian people who welcome outsiders with open arms. If you still retain a photo-album of the way things were before the world caught fire, definitely bring that along as a distraction. If you play your cards right, your foolish hosts may even muster up some food in a ridiculous act of civility. Either set a family time-limit for the time to strike, or a trigger phrase such as 'Murder the Heathens!'
Fun tip: If you opt for the ersatz mud-brownies, have the family attack begin a few seconds after your hosts initially bite into them. A challenging party game is to try and kill them while they still have a look of polite disgust on their faces.

4. The Best Gifts Are The Ones You Make Yourself

Nothing will demonstrate your dedication to your family more than the flesh of your enemies transformed into durable clothing items. While you may save time by ransacking the rubble of a clothing outlet, whatever tattered rags you uncover will simply serve as grim reminders of the way things once were. Best to leave them be. Also, matching spears for all in your clan will build solidarity in the dark days ahead. This is something that civilization once called 'branding,' before the fragile edifice of modern life was pounded into dust.
Actually, perhaps it is best to let such things die away, lest they return anew to poison and corrupt your new family dynamic. Likewise the gift-giving, which will engender such false manufactured emotions as 'joy,' 'love,' and 'hope,' and could possibly create murderous animosity in your spawn at a later point when you do not sate their raised expectations. My mistake. Forget this whole section. I have chopped off one of my fingers as penance. Accept my mutilation as an apology for this blasphemous digression into the dead ways. My bad.

5. Give Thanks For What You Have

With human sacrifices. Did I mention that already?

6. Conclusion

As you can see, the coming darkness is no reason not to experience a joyful holiday season. Just remember to keep it fun, whether your family is foraging through the remains of a department store, basking in the aroma of burning sacrifices, or merely fending off an attack from feral human scavengers. These are times that should be cherished. These are the memories you will linger upon when you are lost and dying in the middle of a scarred, blasted landscape. Make the most of it!
And really: keep an eye on the kids. They want to kill you.