My friend Ellen’s birthday is the day before Halloween. I never remember until the day after Halloween. No one does, she tells me. She doesn’t mind, though. She knows that if she wants a celebration, the people who love her will be happy to have one. But she’d just as soon let the holiday happen and have, at most, a quiet dinner with her grown daughters and their partners.
My mother, on the other hand, who was born on Christmas Day, always resented sharing her birthday with a divine being. The time my brother, father, and I forgot to put birthday cards on her gifts, she fled into the bedroom and threw herself on her bed, crying. I was 8 and consumed by guilt and shame. I panicked that we had failed her and she’d be inconsolable.
Unlike my friend, my mother had always felt cheated. For good reason, I would understand later: an impoverished childhood, a father who drank too much, a mother who birthed 10 children and lost six. It didn’t help that she’d married at 17 and became a widow at 26, with two children to support and no good way to do that. It took my mother’s great strength and determination to make a good life. But often, she was resentful, often depressed. Christmas galvanized those emotions. The holiday drew them from her most private self to the public surface of her.
My own holiday experience used to be an unbearable loneliness, a fear of being alone for Thanksgiving or Christmas, even though that never happened. The loneliness was referential. It was about how lonely I was at my family’s holiday gatherings, and how lonely I was in my family, where we four seemed to live in our own separate bubbles, trying to keep our roiling emotions to ourselves, though they would erupt in squabbles and screaming. As an adult with my own family, opening presents on Christmas morning wasn’t protection enough against my holiday loneliness. Right after presents, I’d pile my husband, daughter, and myself into the car to visit our cousins six hours away. After that, we’d visit friends who lived even further. My loneliness protection strategy: Stay in motion; keep moving.
Christmas and Thanksgiving, at least as reflected by Hollywood, television, magazines, and music, are about family connection. We go home for the holidays. Which is great if home conjures warm, cozy, love-filled joys. If not, it’s a piercing reminder of what’s missing, like it was for my mother, and for me in a different way.
Thinking Psychoanalytically About the Holidays
It’s hard to think psychoanalytically about holidays. So much easier to just trash the whole idea, the way a lot of folks do, and I did for years. As in, Christmas: overrated, a total bore, relatives I wouldn’t be with otherwise. Let’s just get high and watch old sitcoms. Or go on a retreat. Or go to a country where they don’t do Thanksgiving (Europe) or Christmas (Asia). The psychological question is simple, though I never thought to ask myself: Why is the holiday making you so anxious? Or so depressed? It’s true that a lot of people feel obliged to join their families of origin, with whom they don’t want to be. But maybe that’s a good time to think of all the unresolved emotions involved in getting together. What makes it so upsetting? What do you need that you’re not getting when you’re with them? Can you express that to yourself? Can you peel back the annoyances to see what’s created them and get help with that if you need it?
My husband’s intersection with Christmas was always depression. You’ve undoubtedly guessed that his family of origin was a serious disappointment to him. For years, he distanced himself by making jokes about his buffoonish mother posing very grandly, his father counting the minutes until he could get back to his mistress, and his oblivious mathematician brother. But what he hasn’t expressed until recently, and after some significant therapy, is how impossibly alone and unappreciated he felt among them. Holiday depression—think numbness—shielded him from feeling that sadness about his family, particularly poignant on holidays celebrating familial love.
Depression vs. Sadness
It took me half a lifetime to understand that depression isn’t the same as sadness. They look alike but are significantly different. Depression is bleakness, even despair, hopelessness, feeling life is dark and empty, and, for you, it will always be. Your heart is heavy, your mind claustrophobic. Sadness makes your heart heavy, too. But where depression hides the cause with a smokescreen of self-recrimination and resentments, sadness puts its finger on it. It is grief, loss; it is not having gotten what you needed and deserved. It’s having been hurt or feeling sorrow for having hurt others or yourself. Depression happens to you. Sadness and sorrow are what you accept; there’s agency involved.
I think that many people—including my mother, my husband, and myself—intersect with holidays at the coordinates of sadness and sorrow, which, if faced, can open the way to finding new coordinates.
Happy holidays.
