Can Christmas Be Better Alone?

Family is everything, except when everything is pain.

I stared at the mini pumpkin pies on display at my local Co-op until the throng of other shoppers ushered me away.

But not before I checked the price — yikes. Way too much for a spur-of-the-moment purchase. Way too much for something I’d eat alone at home, most likely straight from the plastic container. Way too much for a six-inch-wide circle of chestnutty orange goodness, designed for a single person.

You buy or bake desserts to share them, to pass slices of apple pie around a table after a full Christmas dinner with family.

As I looked down at my grocery basket, its bag of carrots and flaxseed bread, a less neurotic voice came to debate. Good Lord, buy the frickken pie. In the midst of sickness and wars, tragic headlines, tales of the homeless and hungry, take what bit of sweetness you can get.

I paused, mind filled with images of parents and children chilly in tents at the underpass not a mile away. Okay, first donate and pray. Then eat. Besides, your COVID 15 could use a little company.

Yeah, right. My jeans can barely button from months of comfort eating. A better gift to myself would be a bag of apples and a brisk walk down the street.

A glance at the oversized clock on the wall jolted me to realize how long I’d spent wandering. Through the wide windows, darkness began to settle. Soon the desert wind would blanch my fingers. Time to get back to my small apartment, quiet and empty but for a clingy cat (who herself seems perfectly content with a little extra fluffiness).

Is that the reason for my indecision? For canvassing the aisles and chatting with employees, whose own stories of pets and roommates and tattoos I’ve come to know? I don’t want to return to my house, to the place I now call home. Christmas is not meant to be spent alone.

I have my excuses, my socially acceptable (and true) replies to polite inquiries. My family is spread across the country. I often get sick when I travel (three-day migraines aren’t in keeping with the holiday spirit.) And now, COVID.

But it’s more than that. I weigh to whom I should tell the truth, who is likely to spare harsh judgment or change their view of me entirely. Most often I’m disappointed, but not surprised.

The truth is, spending Christmas alone, with a cat or a friend or two, can be balm to a soul scarred by years of meltdowns, of parents sulking and screaming at each other and at you. Holidays only raised the decibel levels. Last time we talked, my parents denied it all. I should apologize, they told me, for even mentioning the possibility that my childhood wasn’t the easiest.

I’ve kept a few pages from old journals. One entry, on December 24, 1999, reads:

Family staying home for Christmas (Mom’s wish, reigning after a blowup with my father). I speak to no one, unless some meaningless “Could I have the salad, please?”…It is Christmas Eve, and yet a day like any other. Later: I can’t stand this.

That’s only a snippet of my tear-soaked history. Doctors and therapists say the mess of my childhood left me with severe depression, anxiety, and complex PTSD.

In conversation with friends or acquaintances, I don’t use these diagnoses to defend my behavior. Naming the minefields that plague my life starts to feel useless, silly — like blaming a splinter in a finger to avoid a draft into the military.

Instead, if I choose to give a version of the truth, I dance with words like anger, sadness. Pain.

“But they’re still family!” some friends say. “No one’s perfect.” Others had it worse, they claim, back when the belt spelled discipline and a child wasn’t meant to be heard. “Just suck it up and go.”

And I did, year after year. Guilt drilled into me, I went home for the holidays, driving from college, then flying from states away. Along with obligation I accepted knowledge: family traditions can be more priceless than gifts. Blood delineated tribes and still, in most cases, links generations and gives people a place to belong.

In its importance, family is every cliché and beyond. To me, though, family is nearly meaningless without love.

This Christmas I revel in silence, in a tickle of whiskers and a purr. In texts from friends, last-minute invitations. In a chosen family that extends across the country, the globe. People who share love, yes, but also their own worries and tragedies — this year especially, there’s no escaping those.

This year we’ll pass around only words, only virtual desserts. For today I’m on my own.

In the stillness, I’m largely at peace with my decision. Guilt lingers, and may forever, in the thought that my absence hurts those once closest to me. By excusing myself from my parents’ table, though, I’ve begun to heal.

Despite medication and therapy, vivid, despairing dreams continue to haunt me. But I wake to the luck of a warm home, a cat, and nourishment from apples to oats. Only one thing missing: a miniature pumpkin pie. Which I plan to purchase tomorrow — ideally, as soon as the store opens.