Happy F*#!ing Holidays
It’s The Most Wonderful Time of The Year
“I really hate this time of year — by which I mean, Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day,” my BFF said to me a couple of years ago. “I know exactly what you mean,” I returned with matching Grinchy-ness. “Happy Fucking Holidays.”
Unless I could watch the snow fall gently over the mountains from a quaint, little ski chalet in Switzerland, with Michael Ealy in my bed, I’d be happy to hibernate from November through February. In my city of Philadelphia, a pristine white snowfall is ill-fated to be indecorously plowed into sooty mounds of grey misery. God forbid I should arrive a single minute late to the glorified icebox where I go to work and try to can for eight hours when I literally cannot. Plus, they’ve got to clear the parking lot at Target so us Liberals can conspire to push our agenda while we shop for discounted bamboo sheets.
Unlike Santa’s surrogate elves who insist that the holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year, I suffer from the wintertime blues. I have zero interest in cold weather activities or participating in the minutiae of life once the temperature drops below 50 degrees. Christmas with my family has deteriorated from my happy childhood memories to an obligatory gift exchange from predetermined wish lists, sidestepping hair-triggered emotional landmines, and futile attempts to get dinner on the table before 9:00pm.
Winter doubles-down on its long, dark, frigid days by being the worst possible time of the year to be single. Thanks to the excessive commercialism of Christmas, New Year’s and Valentine’s Day, it is all but impossible to escape the relentless pressure to be in a romantic relationship. I can’t go anywhere without visions of diamond engagement rings in tiny boxes, kissing under the mistletoe, and hand-holding ice skaters being thrown in my face.
For years, the entire holiday season has felt custom designed to point out everything I lack. When I sought out ways to bring joy back into my holidays, there was one concept that seemed to hold the key: Gratitude.
Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project suggested I start by writing down just one thing to be grateful for each day. Oprah Winfrey, who just has to do everything bigger and better than everyone else, entered five things in her journal for an entire decade. I settled on three things a day to be grateful for, which seemed like a reasonable compromise.
For the first few weeks, it was fairly easy to make a list of all the simple pleasures I took for granted far too often:
- I am grateful for this sunny day
- I am grateful for my health
- I am grateful I can spend time with friends
Then next couple weeks, I tried to find the silver lining to my problems:
- I am grateful that my body that can withstand all this wretched exercise
- I am grateful I have the patience to deal with all the fools I meet online dating
- I am grateful I lived another day to try to make things better
By March of 2014, there was some crazy shit was going on in the world. I began listing the horrible things that did not happen to me:
- I am grateful I did not contract the Ebola virus
- I am grateful I do not live in Syria
- I am grateful I did not disappear on Malaysian Airlines flight 370
I tried to give it a go, but documenting my small existence in this lonely planet only made me more depressed. I didn’t see the point in counting my blessings. The only thing I saw that gratitude had to offer was the empty promise that I didn’t need things that I wanted to be happy. I put away my gratitude journal and never opened it again.
The following year, a well-meaning friend thought she’d help me get through the holidays by urging me to read a post she found about gratitude written by Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love. I was so nauseated by her pretentiousness, I could barely keep down all the holiday cheer I was feeling from my third glass of Wild Turkey 101.
Dear Ones -
Some of you may remember these words (“SONO GRATA”) from EAT PRAY LOVE. It means: I AM GRATEFUL in Italian.I learned these words twelve years ago in Rome, during that memorable Thanksgiving dinner I shared with my friend Luca Spaghetti and his tribe. I think of these words every year at this time, and it always makes me smile.
Gilbert continues by telling us she’s tired from traveling on her latest book tour through London, Dublin, and Frankfurt. She’s homesick because she can’t spend the holiday with her friends or family and she takes a selfie from the back seat of her car while stuck in traffic. Then she concludes her woe-fest by saying,
With gratitude, everything stays cool and everything is always perfect — even when it might appear not to be.
Oh, yes. I’ll be sure to remember that the next time I get stuck in Rome for Thanksgiving or I’m feeling cranky about my promoting my novel through Europe. Bitch, please. I’m glad it’s roomy in that car because you need to take a seat.
Nothing made me feel more angry or resentful then hearing someone who appeared to have everything tell me to be grateful for the little things. Gratitude was always presented to me like a consolation prize on Let’s Make a Deal. I could win the home, family and a six-figure salary or I could keep the loneliness, failure and debt but I could learn to be content with it.
No thanks, Mr. Brady, I’d like to see what’s behind door # 2.
The problem was my bitterness wasn’t making my holidays any more jolly or keeping me warm at night. I was preparing myself for another winter of discontent when I found love in a hopeless place. After the failure of my gratitude journal and the gross yuletide spectacle of her Favorite Things, I had pretty much lost faith in Oprah Winfrey. I would have never expected that one of her videos would be able to change my perception of gratitude. All she said was,
So if you allow yourself to get to the space of a good feeling . . . a good feeling increases more good feeling. The same way that being in a bad situation and focusing on the bad situation continues to make you feel worse.
In that respect, I began to understand how gratitude was supposed to work. Gratitude wasn’t meant to be a replacement for the life I desired, but by focusing on just one good feeling, the life I was living might begin to hurt a little less.
This Christmas I won’t be getting any younger. It looks like I’ll still be single, in debt and kind of broke. I can’t promise that day my Grinchy heart will grow as rapidly as my waistline will by February. But I know I can muster at least one good feeling. Then I’ll try to squeeze in room for another.
After viewing Oprah’s video, I decided to start small this time with a gratitude jar. I didn’t fill it with a memento of gratitude every day, only when I had reason to celebrate or I when I was feeling sorry for myself. In January I’ll empty it and re-read the good things that happened last year that I otherwise may have forgotten. The funny thing is, some of those things that seemed good at the time turned into disappointments later on. That’s a good reminder to enjoy what fleeting happiness we have in the moment rather than reveling in its distant memory. Little by little, I should be able to buff some of the shine back into my holidays, but I know it may take some time. After all, Thanksgiving in Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I am grateful that you found this article! If you enjoyed my writing, don’t be stingy. Click the 💚 so that other people on Medium will see it. Then follow my daily preoccupations with life and love on Facebook at Leona’s Love Quest.
