How to Stop Hating the Holidays
From a grinch who's trying to change.
If you could marry Santa Claus, Iām sure 8-year-old me would have done it.
When I was a kid, I used to make cookies for Santa Claus, write a Christmas list that was a mile long for Santa Claus, and of course, I watched every damn Christmas movie that was ever released.
I did the whole thing. Christmas was the best time of year.
Christmas meant snow (everyone knows that pre-Christmas snow is better than post-Christmas snow), Christmas meant new toys, and best of all, Christmas meant that I didnāt have to deal with school or any of my other āexhaustingā 9-year-old responsibilities.
Christmas was magical for me until one day, it wasnāt.
Somewhere between 10ā14, Christmas lost its charm. The holidays lost their charm.
I started to resent those ācornyā movies Iād grown up watching. I started to think that stockings were a stupid and impractical way to hide gifts. By the time I was 13, I was completely fed up with the way cultural materialism had commoditized a holiday that had once brought me so much joy.
The more I learned about how Western Christmas really worked, the more I didnāt like it.
Why the holidaysĀ SUCK:
In addition to not liking Christmas, Iām also not crazy about Thanksgiving, Valentineās Day, my birthday, or New Yearās, to name a few of my least favorite holidays that everyone seems to love.
Why?
The short answer? Expectations.
The long answer is a bit more complicated.
I donāt like having to have my emotional state dictated by the day on the calendar. I donāt like putting on facades to avoid conflict with whoever Iām spending that holiday with.
āBe happy, itās (insert holiday name here).ā
I didnāt like having to be happy just because it was my birthday. I didnāt like having to show someone I loved them extra just because it was Valentineās Day. I didnāt like being expected to go out on New Yearās and drink myself silly.
I didnāt like being expected to hang out with my family because it was Thanksgiving. Furthermore, 2 Thanksgiving meals without any of my family (when I was away at college) when I was 18 and 19 taught me just how miserable holidays alone can be.
I hated that there were so many people out there who were experiencing that every single year, just because these holidays were magnified so that people could make money.
These expectations paired with a few negative experiences during various holidays have made me, as people would say, a grinch. I donāt like holidays.Ā
Iāll own up to it.
This year, I learned about a different kind of Thanksgiving.
On my dadās side, my grandparents have been dead for years and I barely knew them.
My dad had a bit of a rough upbringing, and that made the relationship with those grandparents a bit complicated over the years for me and my sister. That, and those grandparents passed when I was 8 or 9.
Currently, my momās parents are getting up there in age as well. This year, my mom, dad, sister, sisterās dog, and I all agreed to head down to North Carolina to visit them. My parents and sister planned to drive down on Tuesday, and I was to fly down and meet everyone on Wednesday.
To put it bluntly, I wasnāt really looking forward to it.
Not because of family time, but because I donāt like holidays. Doing stuff for holidays with your family creates expectationsāāāwhich is kind of the reason I donāt like holidays.
Selfishly, I was also missing āFriendsgivingā with my group of friends from my gym, I was missing 3 days of Jiu-Jitsu training, and I was stressed that I was going to gain a bunch of weight ahead of my upcoming match this weekend in the United Kingdom.
The trip was a bit of an inconvenience for me.
Then, on Monday, my grandpa had aĀ stroke.
Before Tuesday, when I found out about the stroke, I knew next to nothing about strokes, except that they were a rock band from the late 90s/early 2000s.
That all changed when my grandpaāāāāPapaāāāāhad his stroke. Suddenly, Thanksgiving the way that everyone had planned was royally fucked. Our plans were completely irrelevant now because the entire weekend suddenly (as it should have) revolved around my grandpaās condition.
How was he doing? When was he going to get out of the hospital? What would be the long-term effects?
Really, it boiled down to this:
Would he be okay?
Hereās the hard truth: I donāt know what the long-term effects of that stroke will be yet. Papa is doing well right now, but itās still a jarring experience.
When I went to see him in the hospital, it felt like he barely knew me.
I canāt tell if thatās because of the stroke or if thatās because he doesnāt really know me. I mean, I havenāt exactly been the most fun grandson over the yearsāāāespecially during the holidays. Iām a holiday cynic.
Holidays bring out the worst in me.
This Thanksgiving made me realize something very important that I read about in Sahil Bloomās Twitter thread just a few days earlier:
The older you get, the time that you have left to spend with your family decreases exponentially.
Itās okay to hate the holidays.
Last weekend made me think a bit differently about holidays.
Everyone seemed so much more anxious than normal. It was a hard time.
One thing that I realized was that the entire time I was there, struggling to get through Thanksgiving with my family who was also struggling to get through Thanksgiving, I wasnāt thinking about how much I hate Thanksgiving. I wasnāt having the best time given the circumstances, but I was a lot more present this Thanksgiving than I usually am.
I still hate the holidays. Itās weird that Thanksgiving has become āNational Binge Eating Dayā and Christmas has become āNational Buy People Shit They Donāt Need Dayā. However, this doesnāt mean that these holidays are bad inherently.
What sucks about holidays isnāt the holidays, itās the way that theyāre practiced. Modern holidays are practiced and celebrated with a lot of weird, mindless traditions. These holidays create expectations that make us disconnected from ourselves and each other.
If you can learn to be mindful despite the odds being stacked against you, you can become very present during the holidays.
You might realize like I did this weekend, the fragility of everything we have in this life. This might make you appreciate the holidays a bit more.
Closing Thoughts
Iām nervous to publish an essay about how I hate the holidays because I donāt want a family member to stumble upon it and think that because I hate the holidays and youāre supposed to spend holidays with your family ergo I hate my family.
This isnāt true.
I honestly donāt have much in common with my family anymore, but I know them and I love them.
I just hate the way holidays are practiced.
One thing Iām trying to make a more active effort to do is to get through the holidays without becoming wrapped up in customs, and instead trying to become wrapped up in moments.
To put it bluntly, I donāt give a fuck about Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas presents. I care about being accepting of whatever I experience.
āWhatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.āāāāEckhart Tolle
You canāt escape the holidays (they come every single year), but maybe you can escape the misery you feel during them.
Escape the misery of the holidays by accepting the miserable experience and dealing with it.
Iāll be competing tomorrow at Grapplefest in Liverpool, UK. If youād like to watch, hereās the link to the Pay-Per-View.
A few of my new projects are almost done and dropping soon. Excited to share what Iāve been working on. š