I can relate to different parts of the spectrum represented here. I have felt a variety of feelings toward the holidays. One thing that has worked for me is giving myself permission to toss out anything I don't feel like doing. Now that I have a four and a half year old, I feel like I need/want to do something about each holiday, but I keep it really simple. For example, the various efforts I put out for Halloween were: go to Walgreen's and pay $2.99 each for Mr. Meno, MiniMeno and I each to have tiger ears and a tiger tail, that we wore with our regular clothes, and voila! we were a family of tigers (MiniMeno's request). Someone gave her a little pumpkin, and I let her decorate it with washable markers, multiple times. We also bought one large-ish Halloween blow up decoration thing, and one tiny table Halloween decoration thing, that she liked. No candy. She got enough just with various Halloween-oriented people giving her some in the couple of weeks before Halloween. We are lucky that we have friends who give a Halloween party every year, so that gets to be our main event. No trick or treating. (We'll see how long that lasts.)
For Christmas, I plan to do similarly - we have friends who decorate their house and yard insanely, starting Thanksgiving weekend, so most years we go over and help them, and then eventually get around to doing a little bit around our own house. This works for me. Also, I try to remember who I really feel responsible for giving gifts to - there are three people in this world who count on me to be their number one present-giver: my mother, my husband, and my child. Everyone else in my little world does not need to count on me for a gift, so I actually give very few - and we now often give one thing to a whole family when we do give a gift. And really we are so fortunate with what we have, there is nothing we "need" as Christmas presents. Last year, MiniMeno really wanted a candy cane, and that's about all she got from Mama and Papa, one little candy cane. Again, that won't quite work as she gets older.
But wait, this wasn't what I meant to write about in this thread. I meant to talk about how my husband and I had a family tragedy on our first Christmas Eve and that this brought up a lot of pain for me at Christmastime for several years after. I basically ignored Christmas as much as I could some years. I've moved past most of that grief, but still it works for me to keep my Christmas efforts low-key, and choose the parts I love, like Christmas carols. I am one who early in childhood memorized many stanzas of many Christmas carols and still remember them. Now I have to gloss over some of the meanings and kind of not think about them, but a lot are still nice, like Good King Wenceslas helping the poor guy out in the cold.
Anyway, I keep it really simple, and that helps. Noticing people who complain about all they "have" to do for the holidays helps me remember that I'm glad I'm willing to not do much.