Why I'm leaning into a sad Christmas, with all the fixings
CBC
In this personal reflection, Shelley Chase writes about embracing grief during the holidays.
It's unavoidable. The Christmas activity schedule is stretched out before you like an apocalyptic advent calendar. Somehow you have to get through to New Year's Day and a tsunami of emotions, with Macaulay Culkin like wiliness.
You've recently lost a loved one. Be it a death or a departure, your "person" is no longer celebrating Christmas with you this year.
Doesn't Christmas know that you are barely hanging on, without having to hang out by mistletoe alone? Maybe you are grieving a parent and with it their shortbread cookie recipe that signalled the season of giving. Perhaps you are grieving a child and Christmas is simply unthinkable.
I've been on this sleigh ride myself the last nine months, and while I am no grief counsellor, I do know grief.
My remarkable mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last January and would leave our storyline courageously, just nine weeks later.
All the memories of Christmas and her are tangled up like those impossible twinkle lights in the basement. I can't separate them this Christmas. So I won't.
An avalanche of loss changes everything. Compound that with pandemic exhaustion and you are watching your own heart shrink three sizes so it doesn't hurt. You are in survival mode and understandably so Mr. Grinch. Me too.
Grief, however, doesn't move on when the dollar store swaps out the Halloween decor for gingerbread kits. It settles right on in and puts its feet up on your kitchen table and cracks open a clementine.
If the next few days look like death by a thousand paper snowflake cuts, then read on dear puffy red-nosed friend. You are not alone in your personal North Pole isolation camp.
The urge to avoid all merriment is strong. You must cancel Bing Crosby and seasonal beverages at all costs, right? But will it help ease your pain and overwhelming sense of loss?
No.
Because now you have FOMO, and avoiding Christmas is becoming a full-time guerrilla mission with people avoiding you, and it's literally snowballing. So stop. Just stop.
Stay with me here. What if you Love Actually lean into it? Like actually acknowledge it?
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