Right after Halloween each year, the same messages slide into my inbox: “This will be my first Thanksgiving without my mom. How do I get through it?” “My sister keeps planning this huge Christmas like nothing happened.” “I don’t know how to tell friends I’m not okay when they’re all celebrating.” The pings are as predictable as they are heartbreaking.
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The American holiday machine is like a relentless assembly line of enforced happiness. Pumpkins have barely ceased to glow before we’re funneled into a two-month-long tunnel of mandatory cheer where the commands are clear: Be grateful. Be together. Be joyful. And for everyone’s comfort, look genuine about it.
What rarely appears in the holiday cards we painstakingly produce is the truth millions of people live with: This season can be excruciating.
I know this firsthand. My mother died when I was 30, my father when I was 34 (and on an otherwise sparkly Dec. 17, one week before Christmas). The first holiday season after each loss felt like being forced to attend a party in a language I no longer spoke.
Everyone else was exuding joy, and I was expected to join in—or at least pretend convincingly. After muscling my way through that initial Thanksgiving as an unmothered daughter, I fled to South Africa to visit relatives, then spontaneously spent money I did not have on a safari because I could only tolerate being around creatures who wouldn’t try to comfort me with clichés.
What I wish I had known then was that I was allowed to say, “Thank you, but I need something different this year.” I didn’t realize I had agency. I thought grief meant simply enduring.
The pressure to perform joy isn’t imagined. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that a majority of Americans feel their mental health is negatively impacted by the holidays. Grief counselors consistently identify November and December as their busiest stretch.
Women often shoulder the heaviest burden. We’re expected to manage our own emotional upheaval while also producing holiday magic for everyone else—coordinating meals, gifts, photos, traditions, social calendars, and the invisible labor of ensuring no one’s discomfort disrupts the festive spirit. We do this amid a cultural moment in which hostility toward women’s autonomy, emotional expression, and professional roles feels unusually explicit. We do it even when we are splintering internally.
This is the fundamental contradiction of grieving during the holidays: maintaining normalcy while privately navigating rupture, be it death, divorce, breakup, estrangement, illness, financial crisis, or even being overwhelmed by the news cycle. Imagine the empty chair at a festive dinner table, that silent symbol of who is missing. If we falter or propose doing things differently, that empty chair becomes a cracked ornament, a haunting reminder that we risk being labeled the person who ruined the holidays.
The grief marketplace has taken note. Social media is filled with memorial ornaments, specialty candles, and grief-themed retreats. There is something both validating and deeply capitalist about these offerings. Your pain is acknowledged, but preferably in a form you can purchase.
What remains largely unendorsed is something much more radical: opting out. Saying, “I’m not doing the big family dinner this year.” Spending Dec. 25 in a comfortingly unfamiliar place. New Year’s Eve on the couch with pizza, watching videos about sea creatures. Enthusiastially embracing Festivus’ “airing of grievances” ritual. Acknowledging that sometimes the most caring act is to stop trying to make things look okay when they’re not.
When I cofounded Modern Loss more than a decade ago, I wasn’t attempting to build a platform. I was trying to find a space where I could say, “This is terrible, and I don’t know when it will stop being terrible,” without someone insisting I look on the bright side. I discovered that thousands of people were searching for the same thing: not solutions, but solidarity. Not platitudes, but truth.
The holidays intensify the need for that truth, even as cultural messaging works overtime to suppress it. We’re surrounded by images of perfect families gathered around perfect tables. The subtext? If your holidays don’t resemble this, something is wrong with you—not with the pressures we place on ourselves to perform an ideal.
We often hear that joy is an act of resistance. But sometimes the truer resistance is refusing to perform joy at all. Sometimes the brave act is saying, “I’m not okay, and I’m not pretending for the sake of optics.” That honesty can be far more powerful than a smile that takes every ounce of your energy to produce.
Certain religious and community leaders are beginning to acknowledge this. Some churches now offer “Blue Christmas” services, spaces with no pageantry and no expectations, created simply to name what hurts. Their growing popularity suggests how hungry people are for acknowledgement instead of performance.
There’s also an undeniable economic dimension. Americans are expected to spend a record-breaking $1 trillion on holiday-related purchases this year (read that sentence again, I know I had to). We aren’t just buying gifts; we’re buying into a narrative about what the season should feel like. When your reality diverges from that narrative, participating can feel not only emotionally painful, but financially wasteful. You’re spending money to maintain rituals that may actively deepen your grief.
The idea that honesty might require stepping outside these rituals remains culturally subversive, especially for women taught to function as the relational glue of families. Saying “I can’t do this” can feel like abandoning our post. But what would it look like to redesign the holiday machine instead of forcing grieving people through its gears? What if stepping back were reframed as a conscious decision to protect not just our immediate wellbeing, but also long-term stability in our relationships and communities? What if “I’m not okay” were as acceptable as “Happy holidays”?
In my work, I’ve watched people navigate holiday grief most effectively through small, intentional shifts: attending Thanksgiving but leaving after dessert; skipping the family photo; initiating new traditions that reflect the reality of life after loss rather than attempting to replicate a world that no longer exists.
This doesn’t mean abandoning tradition wholesale. It means recognizing that adaptation is a form of resilience. Hospice social workers call this “the both-and” of holiday grief: You can appreciate the joy of children or nieces and nephews while also aching for the person who isn’t there. You can feel grateful and devastated at once.
Practical steps help. Communicate clearly and early about your limits. Build in exits by driving separately or staying nearby, and have a sensory anchor to ground you, say, a small note in your pocket with a comforting message or a calming scent on a handkerchief. Create rituals that acknowledge absence rather than erase it. Decline invitations when needed and propose alternatives that feel manageable.
But individual strategies aren’t enough. We need a cultural shift. We need workplaces that recognize grief’s seasonal intensification. Families that can tolerate hearing, “I love you, but not like this, not this year.” And we must stop expecting women to silently shoulder the emotional architecture of the season while hiding their own pain.
The holidays will come, whether we’re ready or not. The empty chair remains empty. But perhaps we can build a version of this season spacious enough to contain both joy and sorrow; one that treats opting out not as a failure but as a form of wisdom. A season where the most radical offering is permission to show up as we are: messy, heartbroken, resilient, and real.