I’m almost 30 years old, but I still wake up excited on Christmas morning, just like I did when I was five. I’m not entirely sure if that’s due to a Pavlovian response or if it’s just the child in me reacting to the sparkle of the Christmas tree. I like to get up before everyone else and sit cross-legged on the living room floor, surrounded by darkness except for the tree and the flood of lights from a made-for-TV Christmas movie. It feels like a form of meditation, a silent night that culminates in a sacred morning that only I can witness.
However, the feeling lasts increasingly shorter these days. Last year, after just twenty minutes, I started wondering when everyone else was going to wake up. Maybe it’s just age, the natural progression of becoming more cynical and less interested in childhood traditions. Or maybe it’s a sign of the times: Christmas just doesn’t really feel like Christmas anymore. The peace we always preach this time of year has run out.
***
These days, vacations remind me of my Aunt Dana. More specifically, they remind me that she is gone, that there will always be a hole at the dining room table that my grandmother always painstakingly decorated. Somehow, the gap has become both wider and less noticeable since she passed away in 2021.
The point is Dana: she was larger than life. She had a smile that could fill any corner of the house. She loved any reason to celebrate, and she always did so to the fullest. She looked for meaning in even the smallest crevices of everyday life. Unfortunately, sometimes she would run into what we thought was just a crack, but in the end it turned out to be a rabbit hole that she would inevitably fall into. Tragically, but perhaps not surprisingly, this would ultimately lead to her demise.
It was Covid, in case you were wondering. It feels like it was always Covid back then. It’s hard to think about it now because no one really wants to remember those years. There are some rifts that have never been fully healed, some bridges we simply can’t cross anymore.
The year before, in 2020, Christmas was a controversial topic in my family. Half had fallen victim to conspiracy theory campaigns and found the pandemic no reason to forego a large Christmas gathering – including Dana. When I made it clear that I wouldn’t be attending, my choice ended up getting me labeled as the Grinch of the Year. It didn’t really matter to me. What was there actually to celebrate? In 2020, Christmas wasn’t Christmas for me.
Less than a year later, Dana became ill. She spent a month in the hospital and by Halloween she was gone. Just days after her death, it dawned on me that I had missed my last Christmas with her – but bizarrely, what I had tried to convince her to avoid had ended up costing her her life. Guilt and logic mixed. I didn’t have the mental capacity to fully process its complexity.
I’m not sure, none of us to have I haven’t processed it yet – not really. Too much has happened in the years she’s been gone. The pandemic has become a time that seems to exist in a vacuum – we compartmentalize time, bury it away from all other memories, so that we remember the things we witnessed, the way we acted and the way how we felt we don’t have to remember. In the composite timeline of our lives, we have carefully cut out what we no longer have the heart to remember.
But every December I can no longer ignore it. It’s always too quiet in the house. There’s too much missing for the picture to ever feel complete. I miss the chaos of a fully celebrated Christmas. I miss the feeling of never knowing what it would be like to live without it.
***
In the month leading up to Christmas, I have a habit of playing holiday movies in the background of everything I do. I rarely pay so much attention to it; my brain has never had the willpower to multitask effectively. Above all, it is just cheerful white noise, a salve for the end-of-year hustle and bustle that threatens to overwhelm me.
When I recently asked my boyfriend what his favorite Christmas movie was, he replied, “The Hallmark Ones.”
“Okay,” I said, only a little surprised, “but which one specifically?”
He raised his shoulders. “They’re all a bit the same.” As if anticipating my judgment, he quickly added, “There’s just something fun about watching something and knowing how it’s going to end.”
The more I thought about it, the more I understood it. I’ve never really cared for predictability, but in a world that seems increasingly erratic, there is comfort in following a formula. There is always a simple conflict, an obvious solution, a happy ending – all things that seem so foreign to us today.
After a pause, my friend added another layer to his answer: “My dad used to watch it a lot.”
I nodded solemnly; his father had died less than two years ago. It made sense to me that he would use the movies they once watched together as a time machine, a portal to the past. Because in a sense, isn’t that what I do? Every year I put on the same movies that I’ve seen a hundred times. I listen to the familiar ebb and flow of the plot, the mouth and the dialogue I know by heart. I don’t have to pay attention to them, because I already know exactly how they go. From year to year I may change, but they never. And in those moments, maybe I don’t. I could be nine years old, waiting for Santa Claus, or 29 years old, stressed about a work project I have to finish by the end of the week. When I watch a Christmas movie, time works differently: I can be any age I want to be, the world is adrift in its holiday limbo for a few hours.
***
When I was a kid – probably four or five – my sister decided she wanted to do a Christmas play. She had a vision she wanted to perform, one that included a scene where I had to sing “Silent Night” – a song I had never heard before. In the hours leading up to production, she led me into her room and handed me a plastic Christmas ornament that, when you pressed the button at the top, played several verses of the song. After going over them with me once, she closed the door behind her so I could listen to the song alone until I memorized the words.
To this day I still sing the song softly and at the most random moments. Silent night, holy night, everything is calm, everything is clear. The lyrics remind me of those early Christmas mornings alone, when the world still feels quiet and peaceful. No matter the time of year, it brings a strange sense of stillness to my scattered mind.
However, no moment ever feels truly quiet. There is so much noise, too much noise, and I never know how to escape it. My phone screen lights up constantly with messages and notifications. The news cycle moves so quickly that I can’t process one thing before I’m forced to face the next. I can hardly go online without coming across something that is deeply disturbing. Even when I throw away my phone, my computer, my TV, my brain doesn’t know how to turn off anymore. There’s too much chatter, thoughts, memories and fears waiting for their moment to step into the spotlight. Has this always been the case? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that I give in so much to all the other noise now that I don’t give myself much time to notice the rest.
Last December, during my annual physical, my doctor asked if I wanted to stop taking my anxiety medication. “It’s just something I like to ask patients after they’ve been on it for a certain amount of time, especially once the original stressors have gone away,” he explained to me.
My immediate response was, “No, thanks.”
He looked up at me curiously. “And may I ask why?”
I thought for a moment, but there were no words that could quite sum up the immensity of it all, so instead I gestured vaguely in the air in front of me.
He nodded. He wrote the recipe. He understood, as we all seem to do, what that gesture meant. In a time when words never seem to be enough, we all speak the same unspoken language.
***
I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t worry like this. I want to be the kind of person who can fully appreciate a moment without drowning it in all the other layers. I want to be the kind of person who can still love Christmas like I did when I was a kid, when everything had a glittery sheen, when I truly believed that the world became a softer place in time for the holidays.
Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m still leaning into the season as much as possible. I’ve never really been a traditionalist, but I’ll make an excuse for Christmas. I perform the actions as if it were an obligation: I watch the movie, I decorate the tree, I make three or four batches of cookies, I carefully wrap each gift. I tip better than usual and try to be friendlier; I make time for the people I can, even when I don’t have much left. I do my best, if not for myself, then for everyone else around me.
It’s something I inherited from my mother, I think: after a childhood full of disastrous family holidays, she always did her best to make this time of year feel magical for me. She emphasized its importance not through words but through actions – by decorating every corner of the house, by teaching me to bake a new dessert every December, by choosing the perfect gifts and making it look effortless. Through these annual rituals, she diligently and dutifully tried to make the holidays better for her own children. I don’t have any children to pass that on to, but I feel the need to pass the same on to her, and to the rest of my family, and to everyone I come into contact with.
In the movie Eleven, the mantra of Santa’s Workshop is: “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is to sing loudly so everyone can hear.” Things worked out well for them towards the end of the movie, but I’m not so sure how that would turn out in reality. There are much more tangible ways to make the world a better place. Yet every year I find myself belting out the classic Christmas carols when I’m in the car with friends or helping family with chores, and when everyone sings along, sometimes everything feels lighter. Perhaps in all the senseless noise we may not have found silence or stillness, but we have created our own sense of peace. Despite everything terrible, we still found something wonderful.
Maybe that’s what all those silly holiday movies meant when they said the Christmas spirit lives within us. In a world that is spiraling more and more out of our control, all we can do is do what we do can even if it means giving a little more than we have left, even if it makes a friend laugh with the way we sing a song. By showing up at Christmas, even in the years when it is difficult, I try to prove that the love I have for the people around me cannot be overtaken by even the worst of what humanity has shown us. I’m trying to prove that I still have hope.
Maybe it will never be enough, but it is something. In the time of faith I have to believe that it is something.
Reference By: thoughtcatalog.com
