Christmas 2024

I don't know who needs to hear this: Holidays can be so hard. 

Maybe yours are easy and fun and there are no dark moments. And if so, I'm genuinely glad for you. 

But I think, what are holidays like Christmas but traditions? Which means they're imbued with all of the emotion and memories of the Christmases that came before.

Nick bought a box of Quality Street, because his grandmother always bought them for Christmas. They're not, we have discovered, all that great.

But I understand the nostalgia that makes you buy chocolates from your childhood. Particularly those associated with a beloved grandmother.

We buy these things and we dip the madeleine in the tisane.

Memories seep from our veins.

The reason I'm writing this is that I've talked to a couple friends who are struggling, too. So I figure if there are three of us, there are more of us.

I'm here to tell you that it is OK to be sad. It's OK to be elated and devastated depending on the moment. 

It's OK to be disappointed, or wistful, or grieving, or whatever it is you may be feeling.

All of your feelings are valid, always. If you don't allow yourself to feel them, they stick around in your cells anyway.

Feel them and free them and free yourself.

We've been in this prolonged very sparkly! Jingle bells! Ho ho ho! Candy canes! Snowflakes! Jolly! season.

Which I think can pressure people into feeling like they need to be all in the Christmas spirit. (I say Christmas because it's my holiday.) 

Whatever Christmas spirit means.

But my gosh, the pressure of the holidays. Gifts to buy, food to make, school performances to attend, last minute this and that and everything else. 

A school Secret Santa gift to buy oh my gosh for tomorrow MAMA! (I have always hated Secret Santa, and the pressure to participate at work and buy random little things for someone you don't really know, things that will ultimately wind up in that giant plastic floating island in the Pacific or wherever it is. The one that's visible from outer space.) 

Anyway.

It's so dark, at least in my hemisphere. So dark so early. 

And there's so much build up.

And now Christmas is here!

Holidays are a genuinely lovely time to gather. Holidays bring families and friends together. Sometimes it's forced, and sometimes that's hard. And sometimes you wish for more togetherness and you don't have it. And that's hard, too.

But then being together can make an absence so notable.

Being together makes it obvious who used to sit in that chair. Who isn't here with us. Whether they're no longer alive or just no longer in our lives.

That is painful.

Until last year, I'd spent exactly one Christmas away from home. 

Home was my parents' house, whichever country that might be. And I always went home for Christmas.

Home was my family. Christmas was the same ornaments we'd been putting on the tree since my childhood. In fact, they'd been putting some of them on their trees since before I was even born.

After my dad died, and family became Betty, Jordan, Nick, and me, Christmas transferred to our house. Even that first year, when we didn't really have a functional ground floor.

We could've done Christmas at my mom's house, where she had a whole working, clean kitchen and no construction dust. But we had it here, on the second floor.

Nick bought a fake tree, and now that tree is as old as Jordan. I assume it'll be our tree till we move out of this house.

My mom was all about Christmas. She made the home, whichever house, beautiful. Her gifts were always exquisitely wrapped.

In fact, I'd often give her my presents to wrap, because she loved doing it, and she make things so pretty.

So last year I said there was no way we were having Christmas at home. We had to go somewhere.

I think, honestly, my family was kind of afraid of the depth of my grief. Anything could make me cry. And I might never stop.

So last year we went to England. It was such a big deal for so many reasons.

It was, of course, still Christmas in the UK, but it wasn't our Christmas. We didn't put up a tree. We didn't wrap presents.

The trip was everyone's gift. And it was magical.

India and I wound up hugging and crying in the middle of Hyde Park on Christmas Day. You can walk, run, fly far away, but grief sticks with you.

I wanted to travel again this year, and the kids said they really wanted Christmas at home.

Of course, I'm so glad they have a strong sense of home, and home is safe and comfortable for them.

We put up the tree—same tree—but this year only lights. Nick and Jordan didn't want the extra work, and I couldn't handle the memories saturated into nearly each and every one of our ornaments.

They put Nick's train around the tree, because we didn't need to worry about Betty tripping or Wanda chewing it. Mostly it freaks her out.

My friend Meg, her mom, and I made Betty's sticky buns. None of us had ever made them before.

I'd never made yeast bread. I was very daunted.

For me, never having made them pulled up the guilt and regret that I never once helped my mom with this annual task. I never asked her if I could learn how to carry on this tradition.

I knew she wouldn't live forever—none of us will—but still, in my mind, she was never not going to be here.

Until suddenly she wasn't.

I'm not saying this Christmas holds no joy. The kids had fun disgorging stockings, which were mainly packed with treats, and opening gifts.

India got me the most amazing pair of pinky-purple Lisa sneakers. 

I made Nick my annual photo calendar. The one I used to make for my mom, who would ooh and ahh over every single photo.

The sticky buns are great, but they're not perfect. Nick and Jordan wanted to know, precisely, what we did that was different.

My mom's recipe is sketchy. She doesn't list all the ingredients up front that wind up being mentioned later. Some are not mentioned at all.

I know this is because she likely wrote it as her mom, my Grandma Lillian, described it. Most of my grandmother's recipes said things like, "Put in oven and bake until done."

And then my mom had made this recipe annually for decades. My whole life and longer. That's a lot of decades.

She tweaked it a little—there's a rewrite that happened somewhere in the aughts, I believe—but still, there was guesswork.

For three people who'd never made them, they turned out really well.

Nick thought I was crying because of how the buns turned out. He wondered if they'd been overly critical.

When really, I was just thinking of how different Christmas is now.

Christmas Day used to be my dad annoying us by making us listen to a record of Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Chrismas in Whales, which is a great story, but we just wanted to play with our new toys. And then when the home video recorder became available in the 80s, he began annoying us by videotaping our every moment.

And then he wasn't around anymore.

My mom just quietly made everything perfect and beautiful, at, as I now know as a mom, a high personal cost.

The magic that everyone thinks of as Christmas?

That's a hell of a lot of invisible Mom work.

And she perpetuated that magic. And now it's on me. And I just don't have any sparkle right now. Maybe I will in future years.

But I deeply felt the absence of sparkle. I missed her excitement at what the kids were unwrapping. Her giggle over her gifts. The kids joining her, piling on and spilling over in the red chair to look at photos.

It's not that we haven't laughed, or enjoyed ourselves. We have.

We have joy ahead this afternoon, with a couple friends coming for Christmas dinner. Small, casual, but still people who don't live with us, which will force us to clean up and use nice plates and actual napkins and sit in the dining room, which honestly, I think is good for us.

Sometimes I admonish myself for being sad when I have so much privilege. When there are so many people who are cold and hungry. So many who literally have only the clothes on their backs.

I've done this a lot in life.

But then I tell myself exactly what I tell my friends, and what I truly believe: your feelings are valid. Your pain is valid.

Other people's situations do not diminish the validity of your feelings.

You can be happy-sad or sad-happy or sad-sad and know that there's a community that feels that same way. You might feel super alone, even surrounded by people, which for me is an extra-hard kind of alone.

But you're not actually alone. We're all made of stardust and we're all connected.

I'm no longer that bitter, bitter Mary in the preschool Christmas pageant in Bangladesh. Upset that I had to wear my PJs and the afghan Grandma Lillian crocheted. Angry that I didn't have a cool costume, like an angel.

I'm no longer her, and yet, I still am and will always be. So many contradictory things can be true at the same time.

I contain multitudes, and so do you.

So, my friends, I am sending you love on this emotion-saturated holiday. 

Big love and big hugs, and hope for love and kindness and peace for all.