Trust me, I have more heady stuff in the works, but I wanted to send out a short message to all women on this Christmas Eve. I don’t normally send Christmas greetings, but I’m working through my complicated feelings about the holiday. Mother made it miserable in childhood with her covert narcissism and materialism. Father destroyed any cultural enjoyment in early adulthood as over-compensation for and white guilt over existing in predominantly British Canada, with British traditions, when he married a Jewish woman. And then it has been years of aloneness at a time that is expressly devoted to families, coupled with living for years and years in a non-Christmas culture (Asia). Normally, I was working on Christmas Day. I didn’t have to think about it.

Last Christmas, I was in the US, abandoned by all housemates and thus alone. This year, I’m in Canada in my weird, asocial hostel situation. Interestingly, most of the people sending me greetings are my Chinese friends and former students, the sweethearts. But I acknowledge that despite my aloneness and mild loneliness, AT LEAST there are no male abusers ruining everything. But I divide my thinking as follows:

a) it is okay to observe cultural rituals as an atheist, and Christmas is as much a cultural holiday as it is a religious one. Christmas is Pagan in its origins, taken over by Christians, bastardized by capitalists, but there is this really nice cultural aspect of the holiday that non-capitalistic, history-enjoying atheists can revel in or at least observe with appreciation. I’m in the long process of healing from the Christmas mangling of narcissistic parents as well as white liberal race- and culture-shaming, and finding my own associations to the holiday. It is interesting. And welcome. I’m sick of being part of the only cultural group on the planet pressured to deny my culture.

b) Equally importantly, I think about all the women and girls in forced family situations, especially during this weird COVID time, doing most of the work, engaging in unwelcome interactions, stuck for days with unlikeables and keeping a brave face. Holidays can be tense and stressful at the best of times for many people as one deals with rituals that are forced rather than cherished, and coupled with drinking, it is not always a fun time. Myself, I removed myself early on from family abuses, but not all people are willing to take such drastic steps to preserve mental health because it is hard to weigh which will end up being worse – being completely alone, isolated, silent and unwanted; or being abused, but belonging to a group. What a choice, huh?

Anyhow, I’ll end this by wishing you all a Merry Christmas and hoping you get through the holiday safely and remembering that any gaslighting or manipulation or general nastiness you may be exposed to by toxic family members is not about you at all.

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