Hi friend,
A friend of mine once told me a curious story: Her preschool-aged daughter brought home an Amish friendship bread starter, a classroom-wide gift from her teacher. The recipe included items she doesn’t keep in the house and required bread-making skills.
The expectation, of course, was that each child’s parent(s) would hunt down the proper ingredients and learn any skills needed to teach their child how to make bread. With no notice, during the holiday season, before the starter exploded from the confines of its Mason jar.
My friend appreciated the thought that went into the gift — from a young teacher who’s passionate about baking — but wasn’t thrilled to have this extra burden.
This is the conflicting nature of the holidays for so many of us. A season that “should” be joyful becomes an obligation to appear joyful while staggering under a stack of expectations, emotional labor and extra duties. For many who’ve experienced losses, trauma or tragedy around the holidays, an extra box of grief gets added to the pile.
That’s not to say that the holidays suck for everyone, or that they suck all the time for those with mixed feelings. I might enjoy a holiday karaoke night with friends and utterly dread going to a family gathering the next day (or vice versa).
For many of us, family is where the expectation boxes start piling up in our arms. For some of us, the holidays look like this:
- Eating a smaller amount than desired at a holiday dinner to prevent remarks on our body size or food preferences
- Appearing alone at holiday gatherings to prevent a “non-traditional” significant other from having to deal with negative reactions from our family members or work colleagues
- Arranging family events that we know we won’t enjoy, because our family expects us to
- Cooking more food than we can reasonably be expected to cook, without sufficient help
- Scrambling to buy, write, address and send out dozens of holiday cards so no one’s feelings are hurt
- Being overwhelmed for months on end
Many of these expectations also fall into the category of emotional labor, which falls almost entirely on women.
Holidays are also when cultural and social norms are instilled and heavily reinforced. That means those of us who live in fat bodies, or are LGBT+, are pretty likely to face a lot of criticism in spaces that should be joyful and warm and welcome.
It’s easy to say “well, just cut those toxic family members out of your life.” Real life, of course, is more complex than that. You can love your uncle and enjoy his company, and still wish he didn’t make a negative comment on your weight once per visit. You can wish your parents would accept your gender preferences without wanting to cut them out of your life. You can love your family and yet not want to hear a constant string of comments that make you feel alone and defensive, or listen to long conversations full of diet talk.
For folks who were raised in an environment where they weren’t allowed to develop or set boundaries, the holidays add yet another box to the now-teetering stack:
- Am I allowed to attend a holiday gathering and expect not to hear negative comments about my body?
- Is it okay to expect my family members to respect my life decisions and not force me to defend those decisions every time I see them?
- How on earth do I go from feeling beaten down after every holiday to being okay while still being able to see my family?
