The holiday season has always been a special and magical time for me, my dad made sure of that. He brought the playfulness into the household and Christmas was his opus. He would start working on the Christmas lights as soon as autumn arrived and he always requested a detailed wish list for Santa, whom he often doubled as (we’re talking costume, beard, hat, the whole shebang). We would buy a Christmas tree almost big enough to touch the ceiling and there were many a night when I would curl up in front of the tree like a little cat and just stare at the lights until I fell asleep. It was a time that was truly filled with merriment and I looked forward to it all year, even into adulthood.
And then something surprising happened. I grew up. And life kept on life’ing, no matter what festive season it was. Before I knew it, the holiday season was one that came with twinkly lights and tears.
Grief is a very funny thing in our society. We associate it almost exclusively with the loss of a loved one but the truth of human’ing is that we experience a tremendous amount of loss throughout our time on this earth. We lose relationships, jobs, homes, timelines, perspective, even sanity at times. We are perpetually asked to just keep on walking through all of the loss, to stay busy enough that the pain doesn’t have a place to settle, but the loss is just sitting there, as patient as ever, for a moment in which you will notice it and validate its anguish.
For one reason or another, the end of the year is a time in which I have experienced a lot of loss and the anniversaries of those losses beg to be honored, regardless of the requirement of holiday cheer.
The melancholy that would begin to settle as the leaves would begin to fall used to catch me by surprise but I’ve started to do something rather radical recently. I have welcomed the melancholia to the table with me. I have given it a cup of tea and a fuzzy blanket and have asked it what it needs during this time. She answered and turns out that she likes many of the things that I do as well. She’s a crafty one, particularly keen to crocheting and painting teeny tiny canvases. She also likes to look through pictures and remember the sweet times, as well as the gloomy ones. Above everything, melancholy wants company, so I hold her hand as she holds mine. I give her the floor whenever she needs a good cry, and put her to bed when she’s feeling particularly weary.
I’m trying to live by a new philosophy now… No parts left behind. And with that logic, all parts get to enjoy. So now all of me is present during this jolly time of year, whether it’s to hang mistletoe or to listen to the voicemails that my dad left me in his last holiday season. Make room for all the parts and they’ll really show you the full range of this whole human thing we’ve got going on here.
