Well thank god THAT'S over

The first different holiday season can be a hard holiday season indeed

A few days ago I almost wrote a post titled something like “the easiest holidays ever?” I almost wrote it because I believed it and it felt true. And overall, there were many things that were easier than they had been in holidays past.

After the intensity of last year — back in November after I said, “Jesus it’s been an intense week” one of my friends laughed and said “The sheer number of times you’ve said that this year and it’s been true” — I told my extended family not to buy or send me anything for Christmas and I wasn’t going to buy or send them anything either. I just didn’t have it in me. I’m lucky that the women in my family are just as happy to bail on all of the rigamarole as I am. We opted out of gift making and buying for each other, even sending cards, and it all removed a major source of stress, running around, and expense.

I also bailed, permanently, on creating our family New Year’s card. It was obviously time. But I thought we might do one last one, focused only on a photo of our kids with our awesome German exchange student, Lenja, from October. We didn’t always do a card every year but when we did they were incredibly involved and typically pretty spendy productions. They involved timelines and photoshoots, required printers and proofs, and then there was all the signing and addressing and mailing. But as the time got closer I decided I didn’t want to do any version of a card at all, even an easier one. I just wanted to be done. I just wanted to let that go, too.

Socially, of course, it was a different holiday season completely. We didn’t throw our Christmas party, which always involved a weeks-long timeline of getting the house ready. It might’ve been fun as hell but it was also incredibly stressful (not a single year went by that on the day of the party I wasn’t dashing around and ranting WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF) and an excuse to bleed even more money. Instead, I had the idea to turn over the tradition of our Christmas party to our kids. It was cheaper, easier, and we mattered not at all in that picture. It was a relief and a gift. And it was another thing gone.

I attempted to fill the gaps in my social calendar but this was my first year coming up against how hard that can be. What I learned during this first different holiday season, this first single holiday season at my age especially, is that holidays are for FAMILIES, all caps. I met a new friend (single, widowed) for coffee a few weeks before Christmas and her words came back to me over and over again during the holiday break “this is when I see all my single friends, because everyone else is with their families”. I didn’t want to believe what she was saying, I didn’t want to accept it. But of course it turned out to be true.