This One’s For the People Who Hate the Holidays

How to Survive Christmas Alone

The first Christmas I spent alone, I shoplifted an inflatable Santa on a stick.

It was my senior year of high school. I’m an only child. My abusive mother had left years ago. My dad decided he wanted to spend the holidays — and, as it turned out, the rest of his life — with his new family instead of me. I didn’t have any other family in America. So that evening, instead of sitting at a warm table laden with turkey and stuffing, I drove to a Christmas fair downtown and bought a corn dog. I stared at couples riding a snowflake-festooned ferris wheel, at laughing children on a shiny green Christmas train. And I thought, “You all are so fucking stupid.” Reindeer are stupid. Associating snowflakes with Christmas in California is stupid. Capitalism in general: STUPID. On my way out, I passed a street vendor, stole a large inflatable Santa (again, inexplicably attached to a stick) and proceeded to cry in my room for the rest of the night.

And so began more than a decade of lonely Christmases. Which sounds miserable, but it wasn’t always. Over the years, I got good at surviving them, and with a little creativity… I even learned to love them.

The obvious solution at first was to join others’ Christmases and Hanukkahs. In college, my friends and boyfriends knew I didn’t have anywhere to go during the holidays, and they generously invited me to their parents’ homes so I didn’t have to stay alone in the dorms. I’d watch their loving parents catch their children as they passed through the kitchen and pull them into a hug. They’d whisper, “I love you, mijo,” or “When did you get so big, bubeleh?” They’d savor well-worn family stories at dinner, and afterward my friends would jump into cuddle puddles with their siblings on the couch. It was all so beautiful. And it was excruciating, because it wasn’t mine.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. These families were always effusively warm and kind, and I’ll always think of them with deep appreciation. They fed me and housed me and bought me presents to unwrap with everyone else. But I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder. I’d sit as quietly as possible, not wanting to contaminate what would surely be a precious Christmas memory with my awkward presence. And I remained shamefully jealous of my friends. What would it be like to bask in this warmth and kindness all year long? Would I smile as easily as they did? Would I struggle as much with anxiety? Most of the year, I could ignore this intoxicating pull, but during Christmas, I couldn’t stop wondering: What would it be like to have a family?

I grew to hate the holiday season. I got depressed after Thanksgiving. I changed the station whenever I heard a Christmas song. I avoided malls and ice skating rinks and any place that might have tinsel or elves or joy in general. I hated the two weeks when all my friends filed out of the city, and I worked nonstop just so I’d have something to do.

One year in my early twenties, I decided that I wasn’t up to feeling like a voyeur peeping on another family’s love. I’d just gone through a bad breakup, and I thought, maybe I can just go this alone. The weight of it — spending Christmas all by myself — felt like a challenge.

I’d spent other holidays by myself before, and one Easter stood out as particularly successful. I’d done the most luxurious thing my high-school self could think of — I went to a buffet with the Sunday paper and sat there eating and reading for four hours. It had felt ridiculous and utterly self-indulgent, and that grandiosity had somehow shaken off the grief I’d had over lost childhood traditions. Could that work again?

On Christmas Eve, I went out to a fancy restaurant in my neighborhood I’d always been too stingy to try. I ordered a lamb shank and ate it slowly, relishing it. The owner dropped by my table and asked why I was eating alone on Christmas Eve. I told him I didn’t have any family to spend it with, so I was treating myself to a good meal. He left and came back with two glasses of wine — one for me, one for himself. He sat and told me about his family. He’d been Alevi Kurd living in Turkey, where Kurds were a persecuted minority. The government had threatened to kill him, so he was forced to leave his family behind and flee alone to America, where he learned to cook Italian food and eventually opened his own restaurant. We swapped stories and more wine, laughing and getting tipsy until finally he had to close the restaurant for the evening.

That was the night I learned the other people suffering through Christmas are the food service people who have to work through it. Being a little vulnerable with them (and tipping extra well!) just might be a way to make a new friend. The warmth of the Christmas spirit is a fertile breeding ground for kindness, but the rawness of a shitty Christmas can be, too.

But the next day was the Christmas that changed my life. It was perfectly sunny and clear — a brilliant San Francisco day. I went on my rooftop with a pair of sunglasses, put on my favorite music… and ate some shrooms. What followed was the most spiritual Christmas I’d ever had. Other people were celebrating Jesus by handing over presents, but I was straight-up communing with the universe. While staring at rainbow patterns in the sky, I was able to forgive myself for the dissolution of my relationship, forgive myself for the mistakes I’d made that year, and instead give myself credit for taking care of myself as well I did. Usually, when I was alone, I was plagued by fears of being unlovable, dying alone and being put in a can and buried on an island of trash somewhere. But today I was able to shake off those fears enough to take pleasure in my own company. To feel empowered in my aloneness. I had overcome being abandoned by my family, built a good life for myself, and courageously survived Christmas on my own: that was something to celebrate.

I clung onto that feeling of freedom and independence for many holidays after. I spent one Christmas in bed with Chinese food and pie, watching comedies. On another, I drove down the coast and took a long walk on the shore. On a New Year’s Eve, I put on an enormous fur coat (thrifted!!), pretended to be rich, and snuck into the bar of a very exclusive hotel. There I nursed a beer and eavesdropped on actual rich people’s conversations (“Oh my god, Amy Schumer won’t stop texting me. I think she’s drunk.”)

My favorite New Year’s of all time consisted of me walking around Oakland’s Lake Merritt wearing my pajamas. It was totally abandoned — everyone else was inside celebrating. So I stood on a pier at the edge of the water, blasted CHVRCHES and had a one-woman dance party, flailing around and singing at the top of my lungs. Even though I was in the middle of a bustling city, nobody saw. Nobody heard. Then, from bars and apartments glittering all around the lake, I heard a thousand invisible voices chanting the countdown: “Five…four…three…two…one!” I watched the reflection of the fireworks shimmer in the water, and jumped up and down ecstatically as I turned up Robyn’s Dancing On My Own. Who needed presents and trees and stupid party hats and champagne toasts and all the material stuff that came with the holiday? I was having a better time than pretty much anyone. No matter what happened, I told myself, no matter who decided they did or didn’t want me, I would always have this. I’d have me. And I was pretty fun.

I encourage the lonely to dance. Take advantage of a typically crowded space, all emptied out just for you. And whatever you do, know that you’re not the only one in this predicament. Lots of people dread the holidays. But it’s criminal to dismiss this hatred as grinchiness. It is the legitimate pain of loss, it deserves to be felt, and it doesn’t make you a negative person. Maybe you’re no longer close with your family. Maybe you’ve lost a parent, or a sibling, or a child, and the shape of Christmas has changed because there is a void where your loved one used to be. Maybe you’ve gone through a divorce or you live far away from the people you love. Letting go of all expectations of what Christmas “should be” can ease that pain. Stay away from Instagram and Facebook. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. And do something utterly different, but utterly joyful, to honor where you’re at in life — instead of where you were, or where you want to be. You might even find a solo tradition you’d be happy to do from now on.