The holiday season is my favorite time of the year. As a child, I looked forward to the time where I could ask for gifts without feeling like I was being demanding or selfish. As I grew older, I came to love the aspects of Christmas that did not present material benefits to me. Helping my family decorate the house, driving to look at Christmas lights and purchasing gifts for others soon became some of my favorite holiday traditions. I still feel this way about Christmas, so where does that universal sense of holiday melancholy come from?
It’s perfectly normal to experience sadness around the holidays, regardless of whether you love or hate this time of the year. However, this feeling is largely uncharted territory. It is usually not a subject of the mainstream holiday conversation because people who experience sadness around the holidays can be framed as “boring.” I will admit that as someone who loves Christmas, for the longest time I could never understand why people hated hearing Christmas music or seeing people’s decorations before Thanksgiving. I still think that people should be able to celebrate the holidays as early as they want without enduring judgment from others, but I’ve grown to understand the frustration from the other side.
When I hear Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” I can’t help but feel sad. It makes me think of what Christmas was like when I was a child when the sight of the tree on Christmas morning felt larger than life. I greatly appreciate that growing older has caused me to distance myself from obsessing over my own materialistic gain, but it is hard not to miss that sense of selfish innocence that all children are programmed to have.
However, because I love the holiday season for many other reasons in my early adulthood, childhood nostalgia is not my primary source of melancholy. Often, the melancholy stems from grief, and I find myself reflecting on past holiday memories with those who have since passed away. A prevalent turning point in my childhood occurred for me at the age of 12: the holidays were approaching, and my grandmother had passed away just four months before. I was struggling to understand why my mom was having a hard time “getting into the spirit.” I always liked things a certain way as a kid, especially when it came to Christmas traditions, and I was convinced that everyone else felt the same way. I was genuinely upset that things were changing so quickly.
It was not until then, after my grandma died, that I realized that the holidays are difficult when someone dies in that same year and you can’t experience the season with them for the first time. This realization helped me empathize with my mother, and as I grew older, I came to have similar melancholic feelings around the holidays. It also helped me to realize that I had the opposite response to grief that many others had during the season. Rather than not being “in the spirit,” I would not allow myself to compromise any holiday tradition in fear that doing so would further remind me that things weren’t the same. I so badly wanted to have control over what I could not change, and I wanted to put others’ happiness before my own and help them get in the spirit. A difficult part of growing up for me has been the newfound understanding that around the holidays, I am always clinging to what once was.
At my age, I have had multiple close loved ones pass away and I still struggle with allowing myself to grieve around this time. This may be because the holidays continue to make me incredibly happy. If anything, it’s one of the happiest times of the year for me, but it still brings about complex emotions. It’s part of being human. When a certain time of the year provokes a deep emotional response, there will likely be highs and lows that come with it. For me, the melancholy is just a side effect of an otherwise magical time of the year, and I am still excited for this holiday season. However, if you don’t find yourself “in the mood” this year, don’t let 12-year-old Gabbi make you feel bad; your feelings are valid.
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