NBC’s fall drama This Is Us is exactly the show you’d expect to hallow quirky holiday traditions. Its special Thanksgiving episode revealed the bittersweet meaning behind each Pearson family ritual, from the eating of saltine-encrusted hotdogs as hor d’oeuvres to the ceremonial unraveling of gratitude yarn. I watched that episode a few days before my own relatives gathered for store-bought turkey and pie, keenly aware that we do not unravel gratitude yarn. Our half-hearted concessions to the holiday season express little investment in the idea of our family as an institution. We eat stuffing because other people eat stuffing. We don’t even have a regular recipe.
My relatives—most of them scattered up and down the Amtrak corridor—tend to decide where to spend Thanksgiving based on how everyone is feeling that Monday. In 2016, some of us came to my parents’ house in D.C.; the year before that, a different group trickled into my grandmother’s home in New York; before that, I attended Friendsgiving while my parents stuck to a weeks-long cleanse that prohibited them from eating solid food. (I told them I wouldn’t let them live it down, so here I am, not letting them live it down.) Somewhere in the recent past lurks a lost year in which my family and I were not in contact, and I don’t know how they celebrated, nor do I remember where I ended up. As for Christmas, if we can barely get it together for Thanksgiving, we’re definitely going to take a rain check on the anniversary of Jesus’ birth. Not that it’s a matter of Jewish principle: Mustering the energy for Hanukkah is also totally beyond us.
Let me be clear: I’m not trying to congratulate my family on being “too cool” for the holidays. We aren’t taking an ideological stand against consumerism or forced cheer. We’re just extremely lazy, and also cynical, and somewhere along the way we decided that seasonal feast days weren’t that big a deal. (Also not a big deal: birthdays and creating photo albums.) I suspect an ancestor in the misty past didn’t want to go to the trouble of digging out the menorah or cooking latkes; then, everyone relaxed into the conviction that such gestures weren’t “what really matters,” anyway. We’re like a family of unsentimental sloths, hanging around doing nothing, secure in the knowledge that we would mobilize for an emergency.
I used to feel sheepish about belonging to a sloth family that abjures the spirit of Chrismukkah. In 2016, I cherish it.
After Trump’s election, I am exceptionally disinclined to perform festiveness just because the calendar said so. Have you read the news recently? It’s all senseless cabinet appointments, outrageous conflicts of interest, and implications that Moscow may have meddled in our democracy. Perhaps my heart is three sizes too small, but I’m thrilled none of my family members will be pressuring me into roasting chestnuts over an open fire or spinning dreidels while Trump starts a feud with the CIA and our hopes for a liveable planet drown in an oil slick. For Americans keen to reject the normalizing force of ritual right now, a lack of expectation surrounding holiday traditions feels like the most thoughtful, exquisitely wrapped gift.
What’s more, the national trauma we’ve sustained provides us with an opportunity. Q4’s gauntlet of merriment can be stressful, lonely, and alienating for people who are facing personal challenges. It’s no fun when your insides don’t match the world’s tinsel-wrapped outsides. This year, however, the world is wrapped in garbage. Rather than being coerced together by artificial joy, we can draw together, truly, in anxiety.
Therefore, anyone wrestling with existential dread about the future is welcome to hang out with me over Christmas. We can watch some Netflix, order pizza, and drop by my folks’ place to play with Izzy the dog. We can pretend we have no idea why all the stores are closed. We can unravel some gratitude yarn and use it to spell out the message FUCK THIS on the floor.
Just as long as we’re not weird about it. After my “lost year” ended, I grew temporarily addicted to performing closeness and affection around my relatives. I’d explicitly tell family members I cared about them. I’d meet my dad for drinks and dramatically get the check because seeing him was so important to me. Later, we’d be sitting on the couch watching TV and I’d blab inanities like “I’m so glad to be here!” “This is so nice!” and “I love this couch.”
No offense to my parents’ couch, but that approach was profoundly misguided. I’ve learned to embrace my family’s anti-gestures, our preference for reading in companionable silence, gathering when we feel up to it, and not making a big embarrassing deal out of one another’s birthdays. Latkes are great. Mistletoe is pretty. But in the year of Trump especially, I’d rather just love and be loved.
