Winter holidays are the worst. And we need them.
Notes on celebration and connection for the year ahead.
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It’s the second week of January—the winter holiday season is safely behind me. It already almost feels like a long time ago, doesn’t it? No? Because like me, you still have a tree up and haven’t cleared out old stuff the kid has outgrown to make room for new stuff?
If you’re like me you are also stubbornly refusing to take down the holiday cards stuck to your wall because the smiling faces of friends and family make you happy—even if you don’t have the wherewithal to return the favor and do holiday cards yourself.
I’m neck deep in my January to-do list, (or neck deep in procrastinating on it). But first, I’m pausing here to take stock of not the physical and logistical toll of the end of the year—but the mental and emotional one.
Because every year I have amnesia, and think it will be different. But every year it’s not different.
So here’s a reminder to myself of how the end of the year is going to go—while it’s still fresh in my mind.
Every December (or late November-ish) I go into the month with a naïve nervous excitement. This is a delusional nervous excitement, in which I think somehow this will be the year that is different. That I’m different.
This time, the end of the year and the winter holidays will be like the trip to Disneyland where no one gets motion sickness, and the lines aren’t long, and no one gets hot and tired and yells at each other and no one vomits, and we all magically go on Space Mountain 5 times in a row laughing our heads off.
I hold onto this delusion, even though every December for the last many, many Decembers, is metaphorically and in some ways literally the trip to Disneyland where someone throws up and someone cries and family fun warps into family dysfunction at breakneck, Space Mountain-like speed.
Lest I forget, here are a list of some of the lows and not-great behaviors I racked up this last December:
-One morning when pre-holiday stress and feelings were at a fever pitch, I arrived late to a restaurant for a meet-up with a group of parents that I don’t know well, and I immediately got overwhelmed when I saw that the tables were full and there wasn’t a place to sit. So I turned around and walked out before anyone could see me, like I was a 7th-grader feeling awkward in the lunchroom.
-I bit my partner’s head off over a critique of gentle parenting that he sent in a group chat that I definitely took to be a criticism of my own parenting.
-I experienced piercing annoyance (that maybe definitely registered on my face) when I was pressured at a holiday party to perform a group karaoke number.
-I purchased cookie boxes as gifts for neighbors and friends, and got zero of them delivered before we got on a 5 am flight to fly out west to visit family.
-I dismissed attempts my partner made to make plans for my (December) birthday, then made plans for his birthday that takes place later the same week, then had a highly predictable and avoidable meltdown on my own birthday when there were not plans. This may have involved an episode where I threw away what I perceived to be a thoughtless gift in the garbage immediately after I opened the package. Just plop—right in the trash. (HAHA! I’m laughing as I write this because it’s so immature and also just felt sooo right in the moment—shrug emoji).
This brings me to my first note to self, which is that the end of the year is A GLASS CASE OF EMOTION.
It just is! True, I have my birthday and my partner’s birthday in December to really top it off. I also usually have approximately 45 papers and projects to grade, since I’m a uni prof, and about 8 hours of childcare to do it before my daughter’s school closes for the holidays.
But don’t we all have our own version of this, where everything just piles upppp in December, especially for parents, and especially for moms, to where it’s just not not going to be a meltdown at some point?
It’s true that the holidays are a time of peak mental (and physical) load for women.
Women are the holidays.
We all know that our holiday memories would boil down to a pack of stale lifesavers wrapped in newspaper and Jimmy John delivery if we left it to men.
My partner, who is not American and did not grow up with much money, sees my December scramble and Space Mountain-level emotional rollercoaster as mostly unnecessary and self-inflicted. And I think he’s half-right.
But I think he’s only half right.
Because I need, we need, things to look forward to.
We need times that are special. And those things just don’t happen often without some planning and setting-aside and celebration-making.
My partner and I aren’t religious and don’t practice the different Christian faiths that we were raised in, but the winter holidays and the end of the year are nonetheless a time of anticipation, for me, at least.
“It’s just another day,” my partner says about the Christmas build-up.
I disagree. So many of my days, especially September through December, which is my busiest season at work, are a grind of too much work and not enough hours in the day. All of us are just trying to get through the day, each day, and waking up and doing it again.
I long to have days that are special, where time is bent and stretches out and feels different and luxurious. We all need this, I need this.
So I want to remind myself of the other side—the highs of the December Glass Case of Emotion. Because these things and these feelings also happened this December:
-I welled up in happy tears as my daughter’s kindergarten class sang “This little light of mine” at her school’s winter assembly program, and she searched for my face in the audience and found it, and gave me a little thumbs up.
-As I prepared to write a holiday card that I would ultimately run out of time to deliver, I felt a rush of gratitude for a family that befriended us this year at my daughter’s new school where we didn’t know anyone, and who made us feel like we belong when they really didn’t have to.
-I felt a wash of joy belting: “Yeah, I wanna dance with somebody/ I wanna feel the ^heat with somebody” into a microphone during a Whitney Houston karaoke number (that I initially resisted) at a holiday party with a half-dozen women and children that I barely know.
-I had a magical and mind-blowing meal with my partner to celebrate his milestone birthday. And our lovely server was so charmed by my lovely partner that he snuck us into the the back of the award-winning restaurant’s kitchen to see where the magic was made, and my dreams from “The Bear” were realized. (It was hushed and flawless back there and I made eye contact with the suited front-of-house expeditor who controls the flow of staff and food who gave me a Richie-like nod, iykyk).
And we ended our evening with a perfect glass of amaro from an ancient recipe in front of the fire in the restaurant’s quaint bar while the rain fell outside.
So yes, the Glass Case of Emotion at the end of the year entails exhaustion and sometimes tears. Is it the holiday spirit, is it the ravages of peak capitalist consumerism in an age of never-ending crises, or in my case, the hormonal swings of pre-menopause? It’s probably all of the above.
But that’s not all of it.
The end of the year offers connection and community and gathering with humans. And while my partner is right that I don’t need to overdo it with a million traditions and gifts, I do need a few.
I’m not advocating for forcing oneself to do things that you don’t want to, or doing way too much, or to connect with family or groups that are toxic and bring you down. I am advocating for leaning into the parts that do feel good.
I need something to look forward to that feels like a comforting rhythm, a pattern of good things to come.
And I especially need it at the end of the year, which feels like the end of a long sprint, and when we take stock of the year whether we want to or not. When I felt the Glass Case of Emotion coming on this year, my body reminded me that December has been really, really hard in the last several years.
There was 2020 when we spent the winter holidays isolating at home. There was 2021 when Omicron surged in December, and we were thrown into testing failure hell (remember this—when it was easier to obtain street drugs than a nose swab?) My family ended up quarantining through the holidays that year too, and that one almost broke me.
And meanwhile, we all just keep living through one crisis after another, and it’s a lot for our hearts to handle, you know? There was the pandemic, and then Ukraine, and now the tragedy in Israel followed by the unspeakable tragedy unfolding in Gaza.
One of my bad days in December was me calling my reps and then just bursting into tears while eating yogurt in the 30 minutes that I had between dropping my kid off at school and starting work. And that’s how we live now, and that is bound to come to the surface at the end of the year as we take stock, too.
But the thing that I want to remember is that the traditions and gatherings and singing assemblies and karaoke parties, and organized special-ness give us space to connect to each other, and to joy. And we need that.
It can feel strange to plan for and make space for joy when there is so much suffering and injustice, but as writer and activist adrienne maree brown has written, “Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.”
Joy and celebration are human, and denying those things dehumanizes us. Activist Darya Alikhani notes that “maintaining, repurposing and creating forms of celebration is an affirmation of life and a marker of our humanity,” and that what historian D. Wiggins called “moments of unguarded merrymaking” have always been forms of resistance.
So the end of the year is going to be a Glass Case of Emotion, but it might be throwing snowballs at your sister, too. And clapping and stomping and singing that Caribbean classic “Bring out de Ham” that your partner taught your family to chant at Christmas dinner.
And that organized merrymaking and connection is not nothing. That is the Space Mountain energy that you need to carry you into, and through, another year.
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MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
That birthday scenario is too good and too real! Resentment and anger, matched with a celebration that ended up being for you both. I love these stories, which take relationships into reality!
A resounding heck yeah to all of this. It feels good to identify with what you wrote here, Lane. And I am ALL IN for the balanced and nuanced approach here; yes, it is a glass case of emotion *and* it is often one person in the family unit striving to make it all feel festive and breaking down under that pressure at times, AND I need the fun and joy and anticipation. Thank you for portraying that middle ground.