Holiday Blues

As a licensed psychologist and therapist, I'm quite familiar with the concept of holiday blues. That experience of melancholy, disconnection, heaviness, loneliness, and, even, resentment during "the most wonderful time of the year" is a real phenomenon that many people experience. It's easy to understand it when the expectations set up in your mind based on all of the advertising, holiday movies, cheery songs, social media posts, and nostalgia of your childhood just don't add up to what your current reality feels like. I've even had some moments of it myself over the years when I've judged myself too harshly for not having accomplished enough during the year or being single when everyone is coming home with a spouse or partner.

But this year the holiday blues feel more like a dirge. Like mourning rather than melancholy. That is because this year is the first holiday season without my mom.

It is harder than I even anticipated. Between being a long-term student across undergraduate and graduate school and then having an academic career for 17 years, I had a lot of years when my holiday breaks lasted for weeks rather than the few days right around the actual holidays. That means I spent a lot of time at home in Louisiana in my mother's home during the November, December, and January months. This was the time of year where we discussed gifts she was buying for my daughter and other family members, where I asked for advice on what to get who, where we tried to not-so-sneakily suss out what the other may have wanted for their Christmas gift. During the days leading up to Christmas, the actual day, and the days after there was a rhythm that I relied on that meant home and safety and restoration for me. There were smells and tastes I got so accustomed to experiencing, sounds as comforting background noise, sensations of sleeping in my childhood room, plans to stay up late talking in my mom's room about all manner of family and friends gossip or the latest politics. When my daughter was born, the rhythms changed a bit to include Nana and her having late night junk food, crafting, (moderately) inappropriate television watching for days. If I close my eyes, I can still hear them giggling and bickering down the hall until 3am as only they could.

Part of the impetus for holiday blues is that the entire energy and rhythm of life changes during this time of the year. I find that things do feel a bit slower despite the hecticness of shopping, hosting, cooking, and partying that happens. It gets darker so much earlier. It's colder and begs us to be inside and cozied up. It all just feels different. We have these deep associations in our brain that connects these external cues with the nostalgia and emotional echoes of similar times across our lives that we have felt this way. These resonances for the holidays and home are being activated in my brain more and more lately with increasing intensity. My body remembers and calls out for home. This year, for the first time, that version of home doesn't exist.

My mom was THE Christmas cheer for our family. Giving gifts and cooking for loved ones were chief among my mother's love languages and the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were where she shined the brightest! You could not resist getting into The Christmas Spirit when you were around her. I have so many memories of this time of the year and they all seem to be flooding back to me at the most random times with great intensity over these last few weeks. And the absence of home, my mother's enthusiasm, the feel of rest, respite, and safety, are all so very palpable. My heart is heavy. My spirit is dampened.

The bittersweetness of grief is that there is a direct relationship between how much you love the person (or thing) you've lost and how much their (its) absence hurts. In that, this grief for my mother is a beautiful blessing but it is also a heavy mantle. I'm moving forward with putting up our Christmas tree and decorating our home. I'm shopping for gifts for my daughter and other loved ones. I'm listening to a Christmas tune or two, making hot chocolate, and baking treats all in honor of my mother. Yet, I'm doing this with as much self-compassion as possible for myself in the moments when all I can do is pause and let the tears flow. I'm doing this with as much authenticity for my very real grief so that my daughter knows she too can express her complicated feelings during this time. I'm doing this in honor of my mother because one of the roles I will always be most proud to hold is as her daughter and she would want no less for us for this first holiday season without her.

I know I am not alone in my holiday blues this year because so very many of us are experiencing personal and sociopolitical grief. There are no solutions to offer because these emotions are normative and sensible in light of all that 2024 has wrought as well as what we anticipate may be coming in the next year. However, I remind you as I remind myself that self-compassion, honoring your emotions, caring for your body, and being in loving connection with those in your circle of support and love are the most important and beneficial practices we can use to move through this time. We will move through this moment just as we have so many other difficult ones before.