A Very Ambivalent Holiday
How is your heart as we enter the holiday season? For some of us, this is the season of love and light, full of friends, family, and abundance. Of gratitude and of precious, long overdue reunions. For some of us this is a stinging reminder of all we have lost and long for. A home to which we can never return. The absent arms of an embrace that we could melt into, a feeling of being perfectly held now gone. Of not having enough food or money to create the experience we believe we need to have in order to show our love for our friends & family. Of not having enough food or money period.
What is true for you during this holiday season? I invite you to take a moment to pause and breathe. What is happening in your body right now? How are you? Holidays are intense for many of us - whether they are filled with joy or sorrow and struggle, or a combination. Taking time to pause and notice how we are doing and what is happening can support us to continue to be in authentic relationships with ourselves and with each other during this tender season.
Perhaps you see yourself in one or multiple of these. I find myself in the murky middle, in the complex ambivalence. Amidst the backdrop of the season is the most virulent wave of the pandemic to date, supply chain shortages and food insecurity, climate reckoning, a devastatingly widening wealth gap and similarly devastating widening gap in our collective perceptions of reality.
A 2019 study conducted by WebMD found that approximately 57% of Americans experienced the death of a loved one throughout the last three years, resulting in grief. Further, the onset and ongoing nature of COVID-19 has only served to exacerbate the experience of grief and loss in society, whether by physical death or the loss of hopes and dreams.
These are wild times we are living in. Shit is coming down the line pretty fast at us. Our nervous systems are often calibrated to the speed of capitalism, which in this season in particular is a speed of ever increasing urgency and scarcity.
But when we shift our focus away from human culture and we attune to the web of life, what do we see? Here in my corner of the Northern Hemisphere, we've begun to journey from the heady warmth and abundance of harvest towards the darkness of Solstice. This is a time when the ancestors of this place would have been finishing up necessary preparations to make it through the long, cold, dark night. The elders would be giving away all the fruits of their labor to ensure the community survives until spring, when the cycle begins anew.
If you look outside your window or go for a walk in the forest, you might notice signs of some version of the cycle of life in the ways of the trees, the birds and bunnies, the deer and the squirrels. Coming together. Pooling resources. Conserving energy. Reveling in the darkness, in their dreams and in quiet intimacy. Surrendering their leaves in trust to the cycle of life. The wheel of life turns and returns.
In my life, this has been a time of extremes, of big love and longing, of loss and loneliness. When I was a little girl, my mother would wake me up at the crack of dawn to open presents. She made me a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee for herself. She could not wait to share the gifts that she bought me. She was a single mom and spent her precious savings (and let’s be real - often racked up credit card debt) to make the holidays feel magical and abundant. She carried a sense of nostalgia and longed for the magical holiday feelings of her youth, so she put all her energy into making them special for me. My heart tingles with tenderness to remember how utterly loved and special I felt in these moments with her. How fully she conveyed my mattering. When I sit with this feeling now, 4 years after her death, I really get a deep sense of how much emotional pain she had been in throughout much of her life and felt profoundly committed to preserving my wholeness, my intact sense of self that had never known the traumas she had survived in her young life.
After presents and showers, we would venture to my grandparents house where the women cooked a big Southern comfort meal while the men got drunk and watched television. The throngs of grandkids would be left on their own to devolve into lord of the flies-esque tribalist play. I was shy and sensitive and clung to my grandmother’s apron strings. When I reflect on these times, I feel a mixture of longing for those special, magical moments with my mother, the feeling of warmth and fullness of the rich foods, and nervous system activation for the chaos of the crowd.
Our family’s expression of holiday tradition is set against a backdrop of extreme poverty and severance from their ancestral ways of community, spirit and ritual in order to assimilate into American over-culture. The nostalgia for a sense of “magical abundance” was in part response to generations of scarcity of food, resource, connection, and the nourishing traditions of our ancestral people. My grandparents often went hungry as children and worked tirelessly as parents. The trauma of poverty and ancestral severance was often internalized and expressed through numbing and violence.
Little by little, through extracting from the land, from their bodies and spirits, they accumulated enough wealth to have an annual holiday tradition of material indulgence. Distinct from regenerative abundance, this was an expression of scarcity trauma, of reactive drink-until-you’re-drunk, eat-until-you’re-sick, shop until you’re in debt, fight-until-you’re-fractured, soothing a desperately frayed nervous system. My sense is that my lineage’s wounding ultimately manifested in a resentment of the care that their bodies and spirits needed to be whole, because the time and energy needed to provide the care was scarce. Devotional, seasonal celebration wasn’t really in the cards. I also sense that we’re not alone in that wound pattern.
Christmas can feel like it’s the one time in the year we carve out space to honor our mattering. The one time we honor our love with a quality of ceremony that allows it to land in our bodies and hearts. We need this honoring of love so deeply and absolutely. It puts so much pressure on us and on Christmas to meet this fundamental need. The result of this pressure within the context of capitalist culture is fervent consumption, a mad rush to express all the love we’ve been needing or saving through gift buying.
What were the holidays like for you as a child? What foods did you eat? What special rituals or traditions did you and your people keep? What stories and memories do you carry about the holiday season? What stories does your body tell about them? Do you know the story of how those traditions developed or were adopted? Do you know what your ancestral peoples’ traditions were?
What have the holidays been like for you as you’ve grown older? What do you look forward to this time of year? What do you dread? What traditions have you carried on? What have you shed? What do you long for this season to be like, feel like, or represent? What are small ways you can honor your longings through tradition or ritual? There is power in the stories of our loss and our longing.
What does your holiday grief need from you in terms of care, permission slips, support, boundaries, space, rituals or connection? Consider these possible needs as medicines for which you can have a prescription. You get to choose the dose and the frequency. Remember, if any of them feel overwhelming, consider what the smallest, doable dose might be. Sometimes the smallest dose can have a deep, enduring effect. For example, say you know there is an event at which you feel obligated to attend but your body is saying NO, maybe you don’t go this year. If that doesn’t feel doable, maybe you can give yourself a permission slip to go and leave whenever you want. What is a small, doable way you can honor what your body and your heart are communicating about your needs this holiday season?
I am sitting with these questions myself. I am contemplating how I might reimagine holiday traditions in ways that honor our ongoing need to celebrate our love and mattering. In ways that infuse the vitality of my inherited resilience and joy. In ways that honor my beloved mama and the big love we shared. How we might create new seasonal celebrations and rituals that weave the meaningful moments of our lives with our meaningful relationships. I invite you to join me in sitting with these questions and to share any thoughts or ideas that they stir in you.
Whatever is true for you, dear one, let’s hold it all together in the communal well of grief and joy. Let’s light candles for each other on our altars or mantles and make an extra place setting at our tables for the souls who didn’t make it through the year. Let’s contemplate how we might honor these holidays in a more regenerative and restorative way, both personally and for this great changing, dying, turning earth that holds us dear.
