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December 12, 2011 

Who's in Charge of Your Holidays?
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Who's in Charge of Your Holidays?

The holiday season is a time of fun and celebration for many people, but for those who are suffering grief or other forms of emotional pain, it can be a time of deepened sadness. For many in the LGBT community it's is an especially challenging time, partly because the images of family togetherness clash with the realities of family estrangement in many of our lives. But I believe that this can be a peaceful, even a joyful, time for us if we respond to the season with authenticity and integrity.

Here's an example of how not to do the holidays. I know a couple, whom I'll call Henry and Carl, who have been together for twelve years. Every winter, they dutifully pack up and take crowded and uncomfortable flights to cold places to spend the holidays with their families -- separately. Both of their immediate families "accept" their relationship, but in each family "the relatives wouldn't understand," so they avoid scenes or embarrassment by spending Christmas and New Year's apart.

As our community grows and strengthens, fewer and fewer of us are willing to accept that kind of disrespect for our relationships anymore. But subtle forms of homophobia still emerge every year in the lives of too many LGBT people. When straight people marry, their loyalties are supposed to shift from the original to the new home, and the new families they're about to create. But the families of gay sons and daughters often treat them as if they're perpetually away at college rather than as mature adults with their own lives and relationships. Is it really your duty to make this a time of enforced togetherness with people with whom you aren't really close? Our real families are the people who are genuinely important in our lives, and if we don't feel like going "home" for the holidays, maybe that's because we're already home.

Many of us unthinkingly comply with old conditioning by mechanically going through the same rituals every year: buying presents we can't afford for people we hardly know; getting too little sleep and exercise while partying too much, getting too frantic, drinking too much, eating too much, etc. If, in the vital area of sexuality, we're able to swim against the current of the dominant culture and claim for ourselves the sexuality that's natural to us, then we can also do the same with the holidays. It's surely within our power to perceive the difference between what we do because we love doing it and what we do because we'll feel guilty or out of step if we don't.

For some people, for instance, the best treatment for holiday depression is just to slow down. As the winter solstice approaches, the darkest and coldest time of the year, a lot of us feel a natural tendency for the body to hibernate, for the mind to become reflective, for the heart to turn inward, and for moods to be more melancholy. But in our compulsively extroverted society, where almost everyone is afraid of turning inward and blue moods are all but illegal, most of us run the other way and become even busier, and more socially active. But if you find the celebration treadmill more exhausting than enjoyable, why not make a deliberate effort this season to spend time alone with yourself to reflect on your life, be in nature, have some quiet walks, meditate – whatever soothes and quiets you.

For the majority in this country, "the holidays" means Christmas. I'm not a Christian myself, but I do feel love for Jesus as a great being, and would personally be happy to participate in a holiday honoring his birth if I thought the celebration had anything to do with manifesting the values for which he lived and died. The fact that Christmas has become a festival of greed and excess must get a lot of people down, because every year we hear complaints about the commercialization of the holiday. On the other hand, criticizing the hypocrisy and shallowness of "society" is a time-honored but cheap way to feel smug and morally superior without ever having to do anything oneself. So, if you're one of those people who want to have a holiday which reflects your spirituality, you might make the season more rich and meaningful by resolving to take specific actions to act on those values before the end of the year. You can, for instance:

Write a "gratitude letter" to someone who is important to you, expressing all the ways in which you appreciate him or her, especially including those things you've never said.

Initiate one act of peacemaking within the circle of people you love.

Give a "gift" to at least one person that doesn't involve spending any money.

If you can afford to do it, you can give a gift to someone you love of something that they really need – but make sure they never know you are the gift-giver.

The fundamental question here is really "Who's in charge?" All we really need to make the holidays a rewarding time in our lives is the imagination and courage to define for ourselves what they are and what they mean.

© Tom Moon, 2011