Okay, so, today we’re going to be talking about Christmas.
No, I’m not about to make some grand seasonal switch as to what holiday I’m obsessed with. On the contrary, actually. Due to the constant invalidation of my feelings toward this time of year, and constant passive-aggressive statements eluding to me being some kind of “pick me girl” for staying so faithful to Halloween, I’ve decided I just want to straight-up talk about how Christmas changed for me, in detail, and why it makes me feel, or doesn’t make me feel, the way it does now. It will probably help to get this all off my chest, even if no one reads it. Though I do hope someone out there may find comfort in it in some way.
I suppose you could say my descent into Grinchdom began the summer before I started middle school. Prior to this time, I was, more or less, the epitome of the “tiny tot with their eyes all aglow”, who “finds it hard to sleep” on Christmas Eve. No, Christmas was never my favorite holiday, but the excitement I felt toward it in childhood was and still is incomparable. No matter what my personal preferences are in regards to holidays, there’s no denying the magic of Christmas when you’re a kid. And I was a particularly imaginative one, who kept my belief in Santa Claus probably longer than most. Not to say I didn’t have my doubts…By eleven-going-on-twelve years old, I’m certain that I did, but the thing is, I wanted to be wrong. I’ve always been of the mindset that there have to be things out there beyond what we understand, beyond what’s “normal”. And no matter how far fetched the idea of Santa Claus is to a mature, rational mind, the idea that he could be real, is a beautiful one. So, when my mother finally sat me down to have “The Talk”, fearing I’d be bullied more than I already was if I somehow let on that I still believed at middle school age (though I wasn’t stupid and always said I didn’t, even if I did), I did not take it well. At all. The loss of Santa Claus felt like a death, though I’m not sure if I was seeing it as the death of Santa himself or of my own childhood innocence. Growing up always terrified me as a child…I had a straight-up panic attack shortly after I turned ten, realizing that my first ten years of life had flown by and in another ten, I’d be twenty! I was never one of those kids that looked forward to becoming an adult. I hated being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, because I didn’t want to think about it. At one point I even told my mother I was going to continually flunk my senior year of high school, so I’d never have to leave. Even now, at thirty-five, adulthood is still not something I can make myself identify with or really associate with myself. So you can probably see how, at eleven, losing Santa Claus felt like closing a door on a very important piece of my childhood. Between that and feeling the loss of the one real bit of magic I thought I’d had some kind of proof of (One of the reasons I believed for so long was actually due to a doll suddenly appearing under the tree the day after Christmas one year, while myself and both my parents were out exchanging a different doll that didn’t work properly. My mother told me at the time that Santa knew I was upset and brought an extra doll to make it up to me, and to this day no one in my family remembers how the doll actually got there, though my mother remembers it happening.), it was truly a devastating blow. I even wrote a poem about it shortly after, appropriately titled Why Do Parents Lie? (My mother, at the very least, was relieved said poem was about Santa Claus after I told her the name of it.)
Despite my sadness, I powered through it, and by the time Christmas was coming around again that year, I had managed to convince to myself that nothing had really been lost, that had ever actually been there in the first place. Maybe Santa Claus didn’t exist, but he hadn’t existed through all the Christmases I’d previously lived through and enjoyed. Nothing was really going to change. I was still going to get presents on Christmas morning. I was still going to spend time with family and enjoy our traditions. Christmas was still Christmas.
At least for a little while.
Christmas was an all-day event in my home, growing up. It started with Christmas morning, getting up to see what “Santa” had brought, whether I believed or not, then we’d have a nice breakfast, usually French toast, and soon my two aunts would appear. We had a tradition, the females of the family, that, toward the end of the night, we’d gather in a circle and take turns opening gifts, as my mother and aunts were the type to buy many little things instead of one or two “big” gifts. It was always fun to see what everyone chose for each other, even once I was out of gifts to open myself, and it was probably my favorite part of the day. It made me feel like I belonged, like I was part of something special, and it played a big role in still giving me something to be excited about once Santa Claus was no longer a factor. I was so enthralled by my family traditions that, when I was with my ex, who had a big family of his own, I always insisted that I had to spend Christmas Day with my own family.
And then things started to happen.
First, my one aunt’s stepchildren began to have children. Now, she’d always had a hell of a time getting away from her in-laws on Christmas…At times it almost seemed as though they forgot she had any sort of family of her own. But once these grandchildren were born, she became less and less and less inclined to visit with us. My mother would ask if and when she was coming over and her response would always be something along the lines of “We’ll be over for dessert, if anything.” At times she would even try to postpone celebrating with us until the day after Christmas, but I always had to work that day, so she’d reluctantly drag herself over at the end of the night and usually seemed like she didn’t want to be there; all conversation would be about what had gone on at her in-laws’, as if they were the most fun people on the planet, and us the most boring. While I understood the importance, and on some level even the preference of spending most of the holiday among children, I still couldn’t help but find it insulting, and it only fueled my disdain for adulthood, feeling as though I was no longer allowed to enjoy Christmas or hope to truly celebrate it, as I was no longer a kid myself. With this situation, another door closed.
My other aunt wound up getting into a new relationship, with a man who was an only child. Her priority became seeing his family, as, obviously, his parents had no one else. They eventually married, and she moved to Delaware, and with that, what had once been a fun, exciting, all-day event in my home, that made everything feel magical and different for a day, became nothing more than maybe an hour in the morning and an hour at night, with a whole lot of “just another day” in between.
It honestly depressed me to my core. It may be cliche to say, but I always felt like, up until that point, Christmas was a time where everything would always be at least somewhat the same. Like, everyone goes off in different directions throughout the year, but Christmas is the time when everyone comes “home”, wherever that may be. To me it was a time of tradition, some cozy thing to rely on, a promise of a day that felt out of the ordinary and interesting, full of memories to be made and stories to tell. But it suddenly became a day more or less like any other. Even the breakfasts with my parents stopped. I started fighting to make my own fun. I would do whatever I could to try and make myself feel the way I had when, at the very least, traditions were still intact, but no one was on board with me. My mother even began saying that she wouldn’t even bother putting a Christmas tree up if I didn’t insist. Sometimes I think her sisters abandoning their traditions, which had been around from before I was even born, hurt her far more than it even hurt me. It got to the point where Christmas started to feel like depressing desperation, and eventually I decided there was no more use in trying to force it. I would always be sad that the traditions I held dear for twenty-plus years died off, unceremoniously, but it was never my favorite holiday to begin with. It changed, and I couldn’t adapt to the changes or make them work for me in any way, anymore, so why go nuts trying to make Christmas into a huge deal again, especially when by this point, I also had a demanding retail job to drain my energy?
And so, Christmas became less fun and more stress. I feel it’s also worth mentioning that my ex, who I was with for over a decade, had a whole family with birthdays right around Christmas time, and he didn’t believe in gift cards. All that money and shopping was an absolute killer. They were all terribly hard to buy for too, as none of them really had hobbies. One year his mother literally told everyone in the family to get her an air popper for popcorn, and guess who wound up having to return ours?
So yes, once my own traditions died, Christmas more or less became about trying to keep my ex’s family happy and just get through the work days leading up to it. “I can’t wait for Christmas” officially became “I can’t wait for Christmas to be over.”
I suppose the final straw came when my parents moved to Florida. I have very little family left nearby, and the ones I do have, all do Christmas with their respective in-laws. I’ve been invited a few times, but I have pretty crippling social anxiety, so I feel like it would be more trouble than it’s worth. I do have to say, though, that having a retail job and not even having the option of visiting faraway family for Christmas, actually really sucks.
All in all it comes down to, I try not to think too hard about any of it, because it’s honestly depressing and I’d rather the season just pass me by, then be reminded of what adulthood has cost me. If a good feeling comes, it comes (and occasionally it does, in small ways), but I’m not going to waste my energy trying to force it anymore. I’m tired enough. On some level I think I’ve outgrown Christmas in the way you outgrow a favorite childhood toy. You don’t necessarily want to throw it away, but you’re not going to full-on play with it anymore, either. It’s just kind of there, reminding you of good times past, sometimes making you wish you could go back, but ultimately not doing much of anything anymore.
And as far as the connection with Halloween goes:
Yes, I know I get snarky about Halloween accounts posting Christmas. Yes, honestly, I do think it’s a little much to claim Halloween is your life and then be in full-on Christmas mode on November first morning, or before Thanksgiving in general, rather than try to enjoy what’s left of autumn. Yes, I wish people running Halloween accounts would make separate ones for Christmas, or at the very least advertise themselves as seasonal. But these aren’t my decisions to make. I’m not the one running these accounts, and I’m not the Spooky Police. It’s simply that Halloween is my comfort in life, and also a coping mechanism for me in many situations. When I get depressed over how my Christmases have changed, I go deeper into Halloween mode, reminding myself that there is one holiday that still holds magic for me, and that that magic is not going to go away like Santa Claus and my beloved Christmas traditions did. My only issue is that even some of the most hardcore Halloween accounts seem to take a two-month break for Christmas, and it gets harder to escape into my world of perpetual October, when I may actually need it most. I don’t begrudge other spooky people a love of Christmas; honestly I’m glad that there are people out there for whom Christmas magic hasn’t died in adulthood, but it’s not easy for me when a beloved community of people that usually seem like-minded, suddenly stop being on the same page as me for a little while and post about something that I wish I could avoid, which is difficult to begin with, and nigh on impossible being a retail worker. I just miss my Halloween community when it briefly goes non-Halloween. My indifference or whatever you’d like to call it towards Christmas is not a product of me trying to be Wednesday Addams. It’s simply how I feel, and sometimes maybe I need to vent a little. I never fully feel like I fit in when it’s not “spooky season” for the layman, but during this Christmas break, sometimes I feel utterly alone.
Regardless, I hope that everyone who does enjoy Christmas has a great one, and I hope that, for those of us that are just trying to get through it, it goes by quickly and we can get back to our regularly scheduled spooky programming.
Whatever you’re celebrating, or not, stay spooky, my friends.
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