Reimagined Holidays

I’ve mentioned in a previous entry that I don’t speak to my parents or most of my family anymore. I touched on it without unpacking the granular details, and I’m still not convinced a public blog is the place to drag those skeletons into the light. Family dynamics are layered, messy, and heavy with the kind of history an outsider could never fully untangle. My situation is my own, but the idea of going no-contact isn’t rare. Plenty of people have made that hard, heartbreaking choice to step away from toxicity, harm, or whatever weight they no longer want to carry.

I don’t want to get lost in all of that today. What I do want to talk about are the feelings that creep in as the year winds down. The heartbreak that shows up like clockwork from late October through New Year’s. That strange cocktail of nostalgia and loneliness that hits harder than I ever expect. When you line up the calendar, it’s obvious why: my dad’s birthday at the end of October, my mom’s toward the end of November, their anniversary in early December, and then, because life has a sense of humor, the big family holidays stacked right on top. It’s a season built for togetherness, and for me it’s the season that reminds me of who’s missing.

This also happens to be the time of year when old memories sneak in. I always joke that growing up, it wasn’t officially a holiday (usually Thanksgiving or Christmas) until my mother cried. And not tears of joy either. She’d be in tears because someone said something the wrong way, teased her a little too sharply, or in one particularly awkward Christmas, because my father gave her a pack of ShamWow wipes. I never did understand why that upset her so much, but I do remember the moment her coffee spilled later that morning and someone said, “Thank goodness you have the ShamWows to clean it up.” Cue the tears again.

That’s what stuck with me more than anything: holidays weren’t about the gifts or the food. They were about emotions: big, messy, fragile emotions that hovered over everything. And whether I wanted them to or not, they still echo in me this time of year.

I told a therapist once that the end of the year fills me with dread. Being single for the holidays is one thing; you learn to live with that. But when those personal dates roll in, the ones I grew up marking in red pen, my heart drops a little lower each time.

Thankfully, the therapist didn’t try to fix it with a platitude. They offered something practical: if the old holidays hurt, reimagine them. Look at the days through a different lens. Build something new.

I tried, for a while. Before CLAW even entered the picture, my “reimagined Thanksgiving” was honestly just a frozen Healthy Choice meal with something vaguely turkey-adjacent. I’d snap a picture of it and post, “From my table to yours,” which was meant to be funny, but sometimes, even I could admit, it was just sad. Still, it was mine. And it was something other than pretending the day didn’t exist.

Thankfully, things shifted. My Thanksgiving has now become a full leather-clad, kinky weekend at CLAW Leather Thanksgiving, and it’s honestly the closest I’ve come to feeling held by a community during a holiday. Inside that hotel, surrounded by the leather family I’ve found, the outside world fades. I don’t even think about turkey or table settings. I just breathe a little easier.

(If you’re curious about this year’s CLAW Thanksgiving, I wrote about it over on my Buy Me a Coffee page.)

Christmas is trickier. I haven’t found a reimagined version for myself yet, nothing as bold or as community-filled as CLAW. What I do have are the kids I manny. Buying presents for Oliver and Jasper gives me a small slice of what the holidays used to feel like. A little normalcy. A moment of magic. Oliver nearly broke me one year when I gave him a quilt made out of his old Paw Patrol shirts. “This is beautiful,” he whispered, tearing up as he traced each square. “I look at each shirt and I have a memory.” For someone so young, he carries the kind of soul adults spend decades trying to cultivate.

And still, if we’re being honest, the holiday season frustrates me. It carries so many expectations with so little return. I’m not an Ebenezer Scrooge, but nobody’s confusing me for Kris Kringle either. If we could celebrate gay Halloween in October, skip straight to New Year’s, and call it a day, I’d be first in line to sign the petition.

This time of year also nudges me to explore the difference between loneliness and solitude. People toss those words around like they’re interchangeable, but they couldn’t be more different. I like being by myself. I enjoy traveling alone, living alone, working out solo, living a life that doesn’t require a partner to constantly collaborate with. I’m not lonely. But there are moments when I feel alone. It’s a rollercoaster, highs, lows, dips you don’t see coming, and unless you’re strapped into the same ride, it’s hard to explain. Then again, if you were on my rollercoaster, neither of us would be alone, right?

Reimagining the holidays doesn’t erase the ache. It just gives me somewhere to place it. A way to make the season bearable, even meaningful. Some years I get it right. Some years I don’t. But each time the calendar turns, I keep trying.

Maybe that’s the real tradition now, figuring out how to build a holiday that fits the life I’m actually living. An ever-evolving life deserves an ever-evolving set of traditions. Ones with room to grow, to shift, to welcome new people in, and to let me appreciate the quiet tenderness that comes from the silence when no one is around.

Holidays are hard, whether you have a bustling family table or an empty apartment. And maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves, this messy, emotional time of year, is to offer a little more kindness to the one person we actually have to live with: ourselves.