My first year working for a large church in Arlington, Virginia, my husband and I ate Christmas lunch off the rollers at a 7-Eleven. Tradition dictated that the newest priest on staff lead the Christmas morning service and I had started working at the church that November. My first Christmas celebrated outside of my home state saw me dismayed at the audacity of McDonalds to close on December 25, leaving us to feast on hotdogs with Coke chasers from a gas station off I-95. Blessedly my mother-in-law cooked a fabulous dinner for us that night, which made up for the processed meat lunch, but it didn’t completely fill the hole left by unobserved traditions and rituals.

I don’t remember much about the Christmas my sophomore year in college. My grandmother entered the hospital (and her deathbed) after Thanksgiving. I turned around four times during my 6+ hour drive from home to college because it appeared she would die that evening. She rallied and I finished the night tucked into the bed in my apartment, exhausted but not sleeping. I visited my professors one by one to explain the situation and ask for contingency plans in the event she passed just before or during exams. All exhibited compassion and offered possible extensions except one: my economics professor reacted as his miserable and arrogant personality dictated by replying simply, “As long as you finish before the end of exam week, I do not care.”

One December 26 as a mom of three small children, I woke up to a singular and depressing thought, “Christmas came and went and I missed it.” I planned the activities, baked the cookies, led the worship services, dressed the kids in lots of green and red, took the pictures with Santa, jingled the bells, decked the halls, and fulfilled every other seasonal obligation. But my busyness covered up any possibility I had to enjoy it. I created the magic for everyone else while remaining wholly untouched by it myself. I can’t explain how it happened, only that I woke up that morning after Christmas feeling desperate and lonely. The big day had visited but left me out in the cold.

The feeling of “missing” the magic and joy of the season during the years described above weighed on me but the incessant ringing of bells, holiday music in every store, commercials highlighting the obligatory good cheer and excessive gift giving of the season made the loneliness exponentially worse. If I believed the din of the world around me, I could have shamed myself for failing to behave in accordance with what the season demanded. Obviously something was wrong with me because it was CHRISTMAS and everything is PERFECT on Christmas…right?

No. And that’s the God honest truth.

Not every Christmas will feel magical and full of only good things. Some holiday seasons suck, plain and simple. Some present unexpected challenges or changes and feel different. Other times we will do everything by the book but our heads and hearts will refuse to absorb any of the merriment around us.

This year we celebrate our first Christmas as a family of divorce. I’m lucky that my ex-husband and I remain great friends and co-parents, but that does not erase the unique challenges we face this season. We plan to observe as many traditions and rituals as we have together in the past but, even if we managed to do so with 100% accuracy, the shape of our family has changed and that unavoidably alters how we feel. For every effort we may make, Christmas will not be the same this year.

I share this for all of you out there feeling defective because you lack the holiday spirit. You are not failing, my friends. Some years Christmas crashes over us and we roll and giggle in its waves, ebullient with the overwhelming magic of it. Other years we run far and fast in the opposite direction, opting for something – anything – wholly unlike sleighbells, reindeer, and red, green, and white towers of sugary sweets that overload our senses.

We pretend this time of year wipes clean any slate for a guaranteed moment of rightness, that somehow nostalgia will be enough to shore up the weak places of our hearts and fill in the cracks of our sadness, anger, or grief. Maybe playing Bing Crosby and Andy Williams at the right decibel will force those “negative” emotions out of us, scattering them far enough afield that it will take them until after January 1 to find us. When this pretense fails, we find ourselves more aggrieved and lonelier than before but now the compounding forces of a sense of failure and shame accompany them.

This note goes out to all of you sitting in spaces into which the illusory Christmas Spirit dares not enter. Or perhaps you find yourself slamming the door shut in its face because you can’t bear to see or feel it. That’s ok, too. It’s ok not to be ok at Christmas. Grief, fear, sadness, anger, apathy…these emotions do not take a winter break and wishing them away does not work. I pray that you find comfort in knowing you are not alone. In fact, you find yourself in good company.

These reasons often prohibit people from catching the holiday fever:
A loved one is in the hospital, a care home, a memory care unit, or other medical facility and cannot come home.
It’s the first Christmas an adult child or multiple adult children will not be home to celebrate.
This is the first time celebrating the season after the death of a loved one.
You find yourself estranged from parents, siblings, children, or friends.
Work or military service requires you to fulfill your obligations rather than travel home.
You are perimenopausal, menopausal, or have other reasons your emotions refuse to follow your actions.
You have carried the emotional and mental load of planning, buying, and executing Christmas magic for everyone else and now have zero energy left to feel it yourself.
Mental illness such as depression or anxiety blocks you from getting in the mood.
You have endured a medical crisis and find merely waking up and breathing to be enough of a challenge.
I cannot list every conceivable cause for someone to “miss” Christmas but this list alone gives us a good idea for how many people out there will not find this season jolly and bright.

Should you find yourself creeping closer to December 25 feeling dread instead of excitement, please know there is nothing “wrong” with you. It’s simply not your year. In fact, maybe it isn’t supposed to be. You may need time alone or time to be with people who understand you aren’t feeling your best. If you are grieving, honor those feelings and try to avoid covering them up for other people’s sake. If your emotional capacity isn’t there, take the time to recognize and name that while not adding on self-accusations of defectiveness and failure.

I do recommend coming up with a plan now, though. There remains a week before the holiday arrives, which gives you time to think about what you want to do on December 24 and 25. If you could do anything, what would it be? In as much as possible, how can you make it happen? And don’t let tradition stand in your way. Some years we need most to not observe traditions, opting for something wholly different and unique. The traditions will wait for you another year, should you choose to take them up again.

A final reminder: people lie on social media…all the time…especially at the holidays. A one hour doom-scrolling session might not be the greatest thing for your mental health right now. People post the final edited photo of the family smiling. They don’t share the three hours prior to the photo when one person cried, another wet themselves, and a third yelled uncharacteristically, leaving every one of them miserable. The smiles you see in the photos resulted from promises for ice cream or the toy that had been refused earlier in the month and from five separate images photoshopped into one.

Should this reflection resonate, I do not wish you joy this season, but peace. I hope you find the space you need, the friend that comforts, a meal to satiate body and spirit, and the courage to be entirely as you are rather than as you feel you ought to be.