By this time last year, I was in my usual full-on, over-the-top Christmas mode. My apartment had been garishly decorated for weeks, my cards had been written and put in the mail, and my Spotify algorithm had figured out that all I listened to was Christmas music and thus suggested nothing else. I had a growing pile of handmade gifts ready to wrap and distribute with love and the grit of someone perfectly satisfied to sacrifice overall self-care in the name of Chriiiistmaaaas. I’d made my husband watch countless holiday movies with me, and, being the kindhearted, indulgent gentleman he is, he’d sat through them with minimal complaint.
Indeed, I was celebrating like it was my job. It was, kind of, since it wasn’t as if I had a whole lot else going on, if you don’t count clawing my way back from a few near-death experiences and handling the major health consequences thereof as work, which I 100% didn’t because low self-esteem is the worst.
This year, on the other hand, my inner Buddy the Elf got lost on his way to NYC. You might be thinking that it’s only the beginning of December and thus a perfectly normal time to start easing into the season. I mean, had Buddy even reunited with his human family at this point in that masterwork of Christmas cinema? For me, however, it’s several months later than I’d normally start devoting all of my time and energy to holiday-related activities and thus marks a major deviation from my typical December behaviour.
Anyone who knows me either IRL or through this blog will be well aware that I’m a creature of habit. Since any change gives me this niggling sense that something is amiss, being mostly neutral about the holidays was disconcerting at first. Not in a wholly bad way, though, but more in the “candied fruit in a treasured family recipe unexpectedly replaced with chopped almonds” one: in other words, a swap whose result is undeniably superior but is simultaneously cause for alarm because according to my worldview, which has admittedly let me down on more than one occasion, different = wrong.
And so at first I refused to accept that a shift in my needs and desires could be embraced as a positive reflection of where I’m at. Instead, in an attempt to retreat back to my comfort zone—never changing, no matter what—I spent weeks trying to locate my special brand of holiday cheer, the kind so obnoxiously in your face that it’s become one of my defining features, almost a personality trait. (Hi, I’m K, the quirky, awkward, seizure-having, wheelchair-using Christmas lover whose fingers are perpetually calloused from sewing, embroidering, and writing manuscript-length documents I’m too anxious to ever let anyone read!) I kept putting “do Christmas stuff” on the overly long list I begin every day by composing. I kept navigating to one of my seasonal Spotify playlists. I kept starting Christmas movies.
Despite doing my best to force it, I didn’t get to most of that unspecified Christmas stuff, I turned off the playlist after a song or two, and I lost interest in whatever festive film I’d chosen (with the notable exception of Hot Frosty), opting to read or craft or research folding power wheelchairs instead.
It took a while, but I eventually arrived at a glaringly obvious conclusion, the kind I’m most likely to miss: that I don’t need Christmas, just one day of the 365 that compose a year, to look any particular way. Why? My best guess is that in contrast to past years, I no longer require reprieve from a gloomy existence I’m not super excited to be living. A December miracle! It’s sort of satisfying to realize that I have lots going on and have lots to look forward to without the time-limited holiday bustle, which is joyous, sure, but is—let’s be honest—also stress-inducing. The fact that I’ve been too busy to pour hours a day into Christmas prep is therefore arguably a good thing, not a personal failing. Armed with this new understanding, I took a step back, evaluated, prioritized, and decided to remove all Christmas-related pressure from myself. It’s been so. incredibly. liberating.
The best and most unexpected result of my new attitude toward the holidays is that both my husband and I are looking forward to Christmas more than we have in recent memory. He commented as such on Sunday after we leisurely put up a tree he’d bought the day before. Lounging on the couch admiring the tree’s imperfect beauty—we’d worked on it a total of thirty minutes and didn’t obsess about ornament placement—he emitted the near-universal sound of deep and true contentment.
“Y’know,” he said, “I’m really excited about Christmas this year.” This from a man who normally supports my holiday demands but is very much not as into it as I am. “It feels so low-stress. Like, whatever happens happens, whatever doesn’t doesn’t.”
I’m in exactly the same place.
It’s not as if we’re boycotting the holidays. It’s not as if I’ve swung from one extreme to the other. We have Advent calendars, but instead of seven (yep) like December 2023, we have two—a really good chocolate one and a McSweeney’s calendar offering a cute little book each day—and have established a ritual of sitting down after dinner to eat our treat and read the story. We have tickets to see The Nutcracker the morning of Christmas Eve. We’ll probably go to a few Christmas markets. We’ll use the holidays as an excuse to watch more movies than we would’ve otherwise, and I’ll almost definitely listen to a dozen or so light holiday audiobooks while sewing gifts that I won’t finish and mail out until I get around to it, likely well into 2025. But we’ll also keep living our normal lives and preparing for our next trip, officially scheduled for January.
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 