Like many, I struggle with the holidays. Not with getting depressed, as many do. It's that my feelings and approach to them just don't seem to mesh with most other people's. I suspect a great deal of this has to do with not having a family in any conventional sense of the word. Oh, yes, I was in a family growing up and I still have a brother today, but my family was not a family in the sense of deeply shared familial bonds. For the most part, my family members didn't really want much to do with each other.
Every holiday has a larger, more noble purpose, typically remembrance of some event or some virtue. We are supposed to pause and pay respect to something we presumably neglect and leave unappreciated the rest of the year. Now, for those of you who read regularly, I hope you've picked up on my dedication to gratitude. That makes me think of the holidays as superfluous. We should, and I try to, appreciate these things throughout the year.
But that's me being smug, isn't it? Or perhaps it's just me being a loner. Maybe for most people the days off or work and/or school are just the thing they need to re-ignite their gratitude. Or maybe the key thing is that time off is synchronized with their friends and family, although as we know extended time with family is not necessarily healthy.
Whatever the case, I remain a bit of a fish out of water during the holidays. For a few decades I spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas alone. Many people react to that with pity, but I was completely fine with it, and even preferred it in a certain sense. There were ten years or so where I happily spent every Thanksgiving in Las Vegas gambling on football games and hiking in the nearby National Parks. (In this I was ahead of the fashion. Vegas used to be empty on Thanksgiving, now it's packed.) Christmas was a point of calmness -- I was not running around buying last minute gifts, or putting on the mask of familial bliss or answering intrusive questions about my life. Honestly, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
Things are different now, and I am working to adapt. I have been adopted by the S.O.'s family which includes a pile of children and grandchildren and a number of Christmas traditions. The first change was in gift giving. My broad plan when needed has been to give one gift of either known usefulness or a gift certificate. The new family takes the opposite tack of many small gifts; enough to fill up the space under a tree and a stocking hung on the wall. This along with a full-on, multi-course, homemade Thanksgiving dinner and a traditional go out for a movie on Christmas afternoon, takes me well outside the realm of familiarity for me.
But there are benefits of being with loved ones, essentially having more opportunities to do the most important thing there is, which is enhancing the lives of the people you care about. And the grandkids are a blast -- they basically use me as a combination jungle jim and punching bag. So I will take it, and adapt, and improve at doing the Holidays in a new way.
I don't want to give the impression that I miss my old Holiday freedom or that I have suddenly come to Jesus on the meaning of the Holidays. It's just different. There will be plenty of times in the future when I am frustrated with obligations and long for my former freedom. There will also be plenty of times where I will be delighted to be watching some inane Christmas movie for the fifteenth time because it is the first for one of the grandkids.
In the larger picture, perhaps the real blessing is that I am still changing and learning and appreciative of what I have. And, so, still living a rich life.
Related: Tanner Greer makes the compelling case for the greatness of Christmas.
