"Your Misery is Ruining My Christmas"
Christmas isn't hard because of money or grief or loneliness - though all of those are real. Christmas is hard because other people need you to be happy about it.
Watch how it works: someone asks if you're "excited for Christmas" and suddenly your honest answer - that you're dreading it, actually - becomes their problem. Your lack of festive cheer threatens their seasonal high. Your authentic response to December becomes evidence that you're doing Christmas wrong.
Christmas isn't hard because you're sad. Christmas is hard because other people need you to be happy about it.
We've created this annual performance where everyone must participate in collective happiness or risk being labelled a Grinch, a killjoy, someone who "just needs to get into the spirit." As if spirit is something you can summon on command, like a bloody Christmas tree that lights up when you clap your hands.
Your colleague keeps asking about your holiday plans when you've just been made redundant. Your mother insists you "try to enjoy yourself" when this is your first Christmas after divorce. Your friends expect you to show up to the party and radiate the same energy they're feeling, because your presence validates their experience.
It's not enough to quietly opt out. The collective Christmas mood requires universal participation. Your sadness, your exhaustion, your complete lack of interest in tinsel and turkey - it all becomes a threat to the seasonal narrative that everyone else needs to believe in.
Here's what's actually happening: people who are genuinely happy at Christmas can only maintain that happiness if everyone around them is at least pretending to feel the same way. Your authentic experience - whether that's grief, poverty, depression, or just not giving a shit about December 25th - reminds them that their joy isn't universal truth. It's just their experience.
And they can't handle that reminder.
So they'll guilt you about "making an effort." They'll suggest you're choosing to be miserable. They'll offer solutions - mindfulness, gratitude practices, "focusing on what really matters" - as if your problem is a lack of Christmas technique rather than an entirely reasonable response to your actual life.
The cruelest part? The people demanding your participation in their joy are often the same ones who'll tell you to "be authentic" and "honour your feelings" any other time of year. But not in December. In December, your feelings matter less than their Christmas spirit.
Christmas doesn't require your happiness. But other people's Christmas absolutely does.
And that's the real reason the holidays feel so exhausting - not because you're sad, but because you're performing joy for people who've made their seasonal happiness conditional on your compliance.
What if this year, instead of trying to fix your Christmas mood, you simply refused to manage everyone else's?
