Dealing with Holiday Season Grief

I made this video last year, but apparently I never posted it here! Building a new workflow for my material has been surprisingly hard. Too many moving parts! But better late than never, right?

Struggling with your old holiday seasons as you become Jewish? Not at all unusual. Whether you loved them or hated them before, especially with the emotionally charged American Christmas season, you can still be hit by surprising waves of grief.

I hated Christmas. My parents were atheists and we had no religious celebration, but we also had very little by way of secular celebrations. They gave me the regular secular Christmas stuff when I was little, but as I got older, they didn’t want to have to go to all that work. (I don’t blame them, as a parent now, but I did then.)

Our family struggled financially, and I went to school with a huge wealth gap. The bullies, who were often also rich kids, would rub their presents in our faces. I saw very viscerally how messed up the Santa myth was: the worst people I knew got the best presents – what did that say about the values of Santa? No one who deserved coal was getting it. It really messed with my head!

So yeah, I have always had a complicated relationship with Christmas and the “Christmas season,” which has only gotten bigger and longer as I’ve aged.

And yet somehow, I still struggled with some grief letting it go. From what I’ve seen, it happens across religious backgrounds. Whether it’s Christmas, Eid, or something else, the grief can and probably will come eventually.

It’s normal. And if you’re dealing with that right now, you’re normal too. It’s okay. Just do the best you can. It’ll pass.

And like all grief, if generally fades with time but sometimes never goes away completely. Eventually, it just becomes a weird kind of normal and you don’t notice it most of the time. But it always hits at the least expected moments!

And guess what? It gets different, and sometimes worse, if you have children! My Jewish children LOVE Christmas and are very upset that we can’t celebrate it too. The advice I got was to teach it like “someone else’s birthday.” You can enjoy how pretty stuff is, etc, but fundamentally know it’s not yours. That’s getting easier as they get older and begin to understand the religious underpinnings of Christmas and that it’s not just pretty and fun and candy.

I always had some holiday grief, but it was never so bad as it was when I had pre-schoolers. Old enough to “get” the fun parts, but too young to get “why” it’s not ours, and the lack of impulse control to not desperately want every fun thing within 50ft. So much grief and anger all mixed together. Why are you rubbing this in my face at every turn?! (Cue 58 people telling me to move to Israel.)

It took a long time to find the grief inside the anger. Grief at what I felt I missed out on as a kid, grief for my Christmas anger as a child, grief for “missing out” now no matter how much I intellectually don’t want it, grief for feeling like “the bad guy” with my kids during this season. Yes, I was angry, but the anger was made bigger and deeper by the grief. Realizing that helped me deal with it more effectively.

So ask questions of your emotions around the “old” stuff, holidays being one of the biggest. The surface reaction is rarely the whole story, and if you want to heal, you’re going to need to dig deeper to pull out the roots.

And that’s before you even get to the relationship dynamics. Hoo boy.