I don't want to celebrate the holidays anymore
I have spent a lot of time in the car over the last few days, which means I have had a lot of time to think. Since it is the end of November, Thanksgiving was on my mind. I thought a lot about my family and how they celebrate the holidays. At this point, it is no secret to my family that how they celebrate holidays, mostly Thanksgiving and Christmas, is very hard for me- mostly because everything is so rushed with so many (often unspoken) rules about what you are and aren't allowed to do.
In recent years, I have made efforts to ask my family to adjust how they celebrate the holidays to better accommodate me. For example, a few years ago I asked my family to be less rigid about their schedule Christmas morning. They usually want to accomplish so much Christmas morning that we have to wake up at 7am and can only spend an hour opening presents before we need to move on to cooking breakfast. As you might imagine, it has made Christmas morning feel like work and I have felt so much pressure from them to conform to their schedule at the expense of having fun or enjoying myself. One year, I got in a fight with my older sister (a complicated story for another day) and said I needed to take a short break. Their response was that they couldn't wait for me, and they all (my mom, my younger and older sisters, and my older sister's husband) kept opening presents without me. When I asked if they could slow down to accommodate my needs, they essentially so no, that they had a schedule to keep. Which hurt me, because it felt like I was a burden and my needs didn't matter if they didn't fit neatly into what everyone else wanted. And that is just a brief look into what that holidays with my family have looked like over the past few years as I have grown away from being the same as my mom and sisters. I have stopped enjoying going home for the holidays in recent years.
Over the last few days, I started thinking about why I care about celebrating the holidays at all. If my family has such rigid ideas about how the holidays should be and I don't fit that, then the holidays just become stressful, as they are no longer about being together as we are but more about assimilation into a dynamic I just don't fit into. I am always the outsider, the lone wolf trying to change things. My mom and sisters single me out as the problem. And it is no longer fun to celebrate, but a burden. Also, I don't want to celebrate the mass murder of indigenous people or the birth of a "savior" to a religion I don't want anything to do with. So why am I trying so hard to make the holidays happen? Because society says I should care? Fuck no. That all feels too capitalist for me. And if I don't want to keep celebrating the holidays, should I keep doing it because society would say that there is something wrong with me if I don't? Fuck no.
If I want to celebrate something, I would so much rather celebrate something that has actual meaning to me personally. Like the passing of the seasons. Spring equinox, summer solstice, fall equinox, winter solstice. This is something I actually care about, that has meaning to me beyond it being what everyone else is doing. It also has the added bonus of not having so much societal expectation around it. There is nobody to say how you should or shouldn't celebrate summer solstice. I could make it a holiday that would work for me- it might even be fun if I dare say so. And if Patrick doesn't care about celebrating traditional holidays either, why not do something that allows me to be who I am now, in this moment, instead of trying to assimilate into something that doesn't fit me at all? Life is just too fucking short.
Let's be friends! A huge part of writing this blog for me is to try to build community, to make friends. So please, if you feel up for it- how do the holidays feel in your family? Does your family make space for everyone's needs? Do you ever feel pressure to give up some of your joy to fit in?
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