Like most people, my holiday plans have been interrupted by the pandemic. Unable to travel or gather in an indoor public space, forced to stay at home to avoid bringing contagious disease to people we love, many of us are trying to figure out how to replace our rituals of gathering and sharing on what can be one of the brightest days of the year, but also one of the loneliest.
I’m better prepared than most, as I have years of experience in managing a socially distanced holiday. I haven’t gone home for Christmas in more than 20 years, for reasons that are complicated and yet completely boring. A carefully honed ritual has seen me through many years of solo Christmases – basically, I eat a whole tray of deviled eggs from the deli section of the supermarket, go to the one bar I know will be open and filled with my fellow lowlifes, and slowly drink the day away listening to lonely stories and Elvis on the jukebox. The bar portion of events won’t be doable this year. Either way, 2020 is when the lonely and the rejected finally have the upper hand on Christmas cheer.
Usually it is us, on the outside, looking in. Watching your happy families, framed in a living room window and illuminated by a well-decorated tree, as we stand in the dark and the cold. Hollywood will never make a heartwarming Christmas movie about us, the unacceptable and the unaccepted, but now you need our misery-earned wisdom. Well, we’re here to help – because a lot of you are just now figuring out what we’ve known and learned to adapt to already: that the week from Christmas to New Year’s is a long, dark one, a week that needs a strategy to get through safely and sanely. Stripped of its typical distractions – the physical presence of people you love, the same family stories you hear every year, the exasperating proximity of children enthralled with a new toy, capitalist rituals of consumption and excessive waste – the holiday season is revealed for what it is: a grim slog.
After 20 years, I have figured some things out, and maybe they can be a help to you, once the family Zoom call is over and it’s back to being just you and the little mouse gnawing his way through your box of crackers in your inadequately heated apartment. Here are some pointers.
You are going to need to indulge some sentimentality, but you’ll want to control the circumstances so that it doesn’t spill over into a week-long weepfest. Give yourself four hours to watch exactly one holiday movie (personally I alternate between It’s a Wonderful Life and Meet Me in St Louis), listen to exactly two holiday records, and spend exactly 20 minutes in a state of unrestrained sobbing. Then take a quick shower, shake it off, maybe watch some Star Trek.
Don’t try to work more as a way to pass the time. We’re all trained at this point to believe we essentially do not exist outside of the neoliberal frameworks of job and family, but it’s no good trying to catch up on emails. None of your higher-ups will respond because they can afford to have lives, and sending an email at 9pm on December 26 will not make you seem like an important go-getter but instead only reveal to your bosses the true depths of your existential despair. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Instead, take this opportunity to teach yourself something truly meaningless, like a card trick. However, do not post the results of your project to social media, because that is simply another form of work.
The problems of every family are unique, with an intricate array of Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian bothers, and you can waste your whole life being fascinated by the way they interplay. But try to remember that no family’s issues – or your particular loneliness or estrangement – is more profound than anyone else’s. As anyone who sent their DNA to 23 and Me to find out which foods they might be averse to and instead gave police the last genetic puzzle piece they needed to arrest a cousin for cold-case serial killings knows, every family has its dark and twisted corners. And we all have our particular pain. So let yourself linger outside the drugstore when the guy you definitely don’t want to talk to starts to tell you about his wife who died nine years ago. Your time is not any more precious than his.
Allow the darkness to do its work. The winter sun will be elusive, so it’s time to make friends with the moon. Let yourself be a body, coddled with carbohydrates and boxed wine, growing soft and sleepy on your couch. Resist the tyranny of the corporate clock: sleep when you want to sleep, watch Star Trek when you want to watch Star Trek, eat when you want to eat, drink when you want to drink.
