Thriving, In Spite of the Holidays
On choosing truth, stillness, and a quieter kind of joy
Author’s note: I reference a moment around the Santa tradition not to criticize it universally, but to explore how unexamined rituals can affect truth-telling and trust—especially for children who take words seriously.
This year, I’m not interested in surviving the holidays.
What I’m wondering instead is whether it’s possible to actually thrive during them—not because of Christmas, but in spite of it. Not by perfecting traditions or managing expectations better, but by choosing something truer. Something that fits.
For a long time, I assumed the dread I felt around the holidays was a personal failure. If I just tried harder—leaned into gratitude, softened my edges, showed up with a better attitude—it would all fall into place. But year after year, the same heaviness returned. The same sense of performing a role I didn’t audition for. The same low-grade anxiety dressed up as festivity.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Out of Africa. About Isak Dinesen writing herself into a life far from everything familiar—not because she was escaping life, but because she was finally inside it. Early in the book, she describes waking in the highlands with a feeling of internal rightness: “Here I am, where I ought to be.” That line has stayed with me for years. Not because it’s romantic, but because it names something rare—a sense of alignment that doesn’t require explanation.
I don’t think I want her life. What I want is what she represents: distance from pretense. A life organized around truth rather than performance.
Christmas, as we practice it, asks for a lot of performance. Gift-giving is the clearest example. We buy things people don’t really want and receive things we don’t really need. Money circulates and returns, often landing right back where it started, except now wrapped in obligation. Someone opens a box. Someone watches their face. Someone hopes they’ve gotten it right. Everyone pretends.
I understand now why my dad hated receiving gifts. We were spending money he had given us on things he didn’t want, then asking him to perform gratitude. I didn’t see it then. I see it clearly now.
What bothers me isn’t generosity. It’s the expectation that generosity must look a certain way.
One of the moments that really shifted my thinking about all of this came through Jaycee, my granddaughter, and through Santa. Like many parents—or grandparents as caregivers—I went along with the tradition. It seemed harmless. Magical, even. Children believe for a while, then they don’t. Everyone moves on.
But that isn’t what happened.
When Jaycee realized Santa wasn’t real, she wasn’t disappointed. She was shaken. Not because the magic was gone, but because the adults she trusted had lied to her. “How can I trust what you say again?” she asked, very calmly, very logically.
I remember standing there, stunned. “Everyone does it” suddenly felt flimsy. Tradition didn’t feel like a justification. I tried to explain why we’d done it, but the truth was uncomfortable: we hadn’t really thought it through. We’d followed along because that’s what people do.
That conversation with Jaycee opened something wider. How often do we participate in rituals without asking who they actually serve—or what they cost? How often do we confuse tradition with goodness, familiarity with truth?
For some people, this kind of pretending is easy. For others—especially those who take words seriously—it can land as betrayal. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. Christmas stopped feeling neutral. It became symbolic of a larger pattern: smiling through discomfort, honoring expectations that don’t fit, suppressing our own nervous systems in the name of togetherness.
And here’s the part that’s hard to say out loud: the very things people insist are essential to the holidays—crowds, gatherings, emotional intensity, forced closeness—are often the most dysregulating for me. What others call warmth, my body sometimes experiences as threat. Not because I don’t care, but because I do.
Dinesen writes about the contrast between civilized restlessness and the steadiness of the natural world—about how proximity to wildness restores an internal quiet that modern life erodes. I feel that tension acutely this time of year. Commercialized December doesn’t invite stillness; it demands momentum. Cheer. Noise. Output. But my body and my spirit are asking for the opposite.
This year, I said no. Not dramatically. Not angrily. Just clearly. I’m not coming over for Christmas. The disappointment followed, as it always does. I felt it in my chest. I felt the familiar pull to explain, soften, reconsider.
I stayed anyway, with the discomfort still unresolved.
What I am choosing instead feels quieter, and maybe that’s the point. I love the lights, especially at night. I love the dark, sacred feeling of winter evenings. I love the cold when I’m inside, a fire going, a book open. Comfortable clothes. Simple food. Long pauses. I love the idea of the winter solstice more than the holiday itself—the permission to rest, to turn inward, to let the year close gently rather than with a bang.
I’ve been trying to reclaim December as a time for reflection rather than performance. For looking back, not rushing ahead. For honoring the dark instead of pretending everything should be bright and joyful. Planning for the new year not as a productivity exercise, but as a quiet conversation with myself.
I’ve come to believe that sorrow becomes more bearable once we can put it into a story. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here—re-storying the season. Not erasing its meaning, but choosing one that feels honest. One that doesn’t require me to pretend.
This doesn’t mean I’ve figured it all out. I still feel the pull of guilt. I still don’t want to hurt anyone. But I’m learning that disappointing others is sometimes the cost of not abandoning myself.
I don’t need to run off to Africa to live a life that fits. I don’t even need to escape entirely. I just need to stop pretending. To choose honesty over obligation. To let winter be winter.
This year, thriving doesn’t look like celebration. It looks like alignment. And for the first time in a long while, that feels like enough.
I’m curious how others are navigating December this year.
References
Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa. Modern Library Edition, 1992, p. 4.