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Start Where You Are This Holiday Season

I’ve never been a fan of the holidays, thanks largely to the need to split holidays between my parents’ houses when they divorced. Growing up without annual traditions or feeling connected to a faith tradition, I never felt the joy the season seemed to demand–and other people expected of me.

For a long time, I tried to act as if–but swallowing my true feelings and putting on a happy face wasn’t fooling anyone and it wasn’t allowing me to connect to my friends and family and start something new. I stopped faking the Christmas spirit and decide instead to start where I was, setting up boundaries that protected my needs and honoring my feelings.

On P.S. I Love You, I share how I found balance in a season that often seems all-or-nothing, and how I’m hoping it’ll heal old wounds. Here’s a snippet:

I tried to change, with the the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, baking trays of Christmas cookies as holiday tunes played in the background, decorating the tree, even going to church services. I thought if I played along it might make others happy, and the clouds I felt throughout the holiday season might lift–or at least part enough for me to grasp a vision of a Christmas That Could Be, Scrooge-style, and have my own seasonal epiphany that joy was indeed upon us.

Only it never worked. I felt resentful that I was still being asked to perform holiday joy. I beat myself up for not being able to move past bad holidays of the past. I still just wanted it to be December 26 or January 2, no matter how much I tried to pretend.

I started to wonder if, instead of changing my attitude to fit the emotional response others wanted, a more sane response might be to change the outsize expectations heaped upon the holiday. What if my stress and sadness could just be, without expectation of false cheer? 

Lindsey Danis

A queer writer based in the Hudson Valley, New York, Lindsey writes about food, travel, and LGBTQ topics. Lindsey’s reported work and essays have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, AFAR, Fodor’s, Vittles, Restaurant Startup & Growth, Longreads and Eater, received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing, and are anthologized in The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes and Mysteries (Mango Press, 2022) and Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid (PM Press, 2023).