The Quiet Weight of the Holidays

The stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas used to feel like a tightrope to me. Everyone else called it “the Holiday Season.” I quietly called it “the weeks I had to get through without falling apart.” The day itself was not the hardest part; it was usually the buildup. The noise, the lights, the pressure to feel festive, the emotional landmines that showed up in grocery store aisles next to the gift wrap. I carried the countdown in my shoulders…you could have hung stockings on the stress knots.

Christmas morning hit differently. His official time of death was around 11am. I felt that hour coming before the clock ever moved. I would wake up with a knot in my stomach, watch the minutes crawl toward that hour, and then breathe a tiny bit easier once it passed. Relief is a strange companion for grief, but it does show up. I did not love admitting that, even to myself, yet it was real.

The logic behind that ritualized dread makes sense when I look back. Trauma likes anniversaries. The body keeps score. My mind linked Christmas morning to catastrophe, and it held on tight. The problem is that the world does not pause for your trauma. Schools hold pageants. Churches sing carols. Life rolls along. You end up trying to act normal while your entire central nervous system is over there tapping a sign that says “Warning!”

The days before Christmas were the worst. I felt anxious, weepy, and on edge. I tried to keep an eye on my daughter because she was so young when he died that she did not connect Christmas with loss. She was all sparkles and Santa. Meanwhile, I was carrying a grief that shadowed every ornament I touched. There was always this unspoken pressure from people who had never lived anything like it. Some may wonder why I could not just change how I thought about the day. Folks love to toss around phrases like “reframe it” as if grief is a weekend project. A little mental paint here, a fresh perspective there, and suddenly Christmas morning should feel brand new. That is not how a shaken body works. Trauma does not take instructions from positive thinking. If someone had offered me that kind of advice back then, I would have nodded, thanked them, and then shut myself in the pantry for a good cry.

There was a difference between my reality and hers. Christmas was still magical for her, at least on the surface. But children notice everything. When we spent holidays with family, she watched her cousins climb into their Daddy’s lap. Her face would fall, just slightly. My brother-in-law tried to include her, and I give him credit, but it could never fill the space she felt. You cannot replace a parent, and kids understand that instinctively.

Recently, I asked her when she realized Christmas Day was the day her Daddy died. She told me she was about ten. Children make their own connections in their own time, they don’t follow our calendars.

Those weeks between the holidays were hard because they asked me to juggle two very different worlds. Everywhere I looked, people were celebrating. Inside, I was remembering. That kind of split can create its own ache. It pulls at you. It makes you feel a step out of rhythm with the season everyone else seems to be enjoying. And I tried – oh, how I tried!

Getting through each year never erased the hurt, it revealed something different. I learned how to carry my grief without shutting out the joy my child (and the rest of my family, for that matter) needed. I tried to hold both states of mind. Some days I did well; some days I absolutely did not. Emotional stamina works like that. It is demanding, and it does not hand out gold stars. It grows slowly and without much ceremony, and then one day you look up and realize you have been walking forward the whole time.

Holidays tend to shine a spotlight on every gap in the family lineup. You are allowed to call it what it is and take the season at a pace that does not break you.

With grace for the mess,

~Stef