Articles on “getting through the holidays” proliferate this time of year in newspapers, magazines, and online newsletters. Their appeal is to those who have lost someone special in the past year and who now must face familiar family rituals that will seem anything but familiar. The audience for such a message has expanded beyond just those families in early bereavement. Some who have had to forgo holiday gatherings these past several years to avoid creating a super spreader event for their family, are resuming something that no longer feels familiar. And many of our life situations don’t match our images of what we hope the holiday to be–that merry and bright, light-hearted spirit made famous in fable and song.
Perhaps we are nostalgic for a simpler time we’ve never know –the images on holiday greeting cards of snow-covered rural countryside scenes that include horse drawn carriages or bundled-up bonneted 17th century Christmas Carolers standing in the streets of a snowy London. But in mid-20th century America, when I was growing up, holiday gatherings were simpler. We looked forward to our extended family members’ sleep over visits, which in retrospect may have caused us all to behave better given that we had company. Mother didn’t have to worry about guests’ dietary restrictions, no call for gluten-free, sugar-free, non-dairy, vegetarian, alternatives in her menu planning. Save the televised football games after dinner, no one had to be told to put away their devices. I don’t remember politics being an encouraged or banded topic, since our doting aunts just wanted to focus on us kids and what we’d been doing that made them proud.
Nowadays, coming up on the holidays the producers of those family festivals are often too exhausted to even imagine having the energy to enjoy them. Those “procrastinators” who leave their shopping all to the last-minute feel energized by the self-induced stress, but come the day, they too may wonder, “was it all worth it?” And then there are those for whom the timing of illnesses, injuries, and treatments make postponing or skipping the celebrations a necessity for this current season. Jody’s brother won’t be released from the rehab center in time for Christmas. He thought it could happen, but in getting ready he admits to overdoing it a bit and he’s had a mild setback. Christine’s dad’s still in the hospital. He may get transferred to rehab and settled in before the holiday. But either way, the need to support her mother will persist and she will be missing spending the holiday at her own home with her husband and two daughters. I hope she won’t be as affected as I was by the candy canes and fake green tinseled decorations at the nurses’ station that medical establishments seem determined to provide. Several years ago, on many near holidays I accompanied my daughter as she was undergoing treatments in a hospital a plane ride from her home. The decorations and the unrelenting Christmas carols in the elevators all seemed annoyingly pitiful, causing me to want to shout, “Please stop reminding us.”
The bottom line is, even in the best of circumstances, it’s the big expectations that wear us out before we actually get to the occasion and its supposed “uninhibited enjoyment of frolic or festivity.” Maybe we need to do what those who have learned to grieve well do– lower our standards from perfection to what’s possible. Let go of finding the right gift, or the picture-perfect table setting and leave room for surprises.
One of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever known about was a surprise my daughter and her husband got as they were arriving home to Nebraska one Christmas Eve after spending 2 weeks at M.D. Anderson in Houston where she was being treated. As they turned the corner from the road into their development, eager to see their three children, they were greeted by the bright blaze emanating from their two-story house. As Oscar Wilde reminds us, “Life followed art” as people throughout the neighborhood had strung the family’s usual collection of lights, and added from their own collections, as many lights as those on the house in the 1989 movie, “National Lampoons Christmas Vacation.” The gifts message of course –“We’re delighted to have you home.”
Since some of your major holidays are in process or will be by the time you read this, may I wish you a Happy Holiday season and offer a blessing given to me by a dear friend, Diane Morningstar. In this season of gift giving, “may you be the gift.”
