“Creating” Christmas

One of the good things about being a therapist is my clients make me face things that I don’t want to face. If they bring a topic up in session, I have to listen and think about it, too.

Like Christmas in older adulthood.

It’s easy just to pretend each year that I may get my old Christmases back again — that suddenly, I will wake up one day, and it will “feel” like Christmas. It’s easy not to accept that I am almost 70 years old, will probably never have a partner again, and no longer have any parents or siblings to “give me back” Christmases as I remember them.

But ignoring all that just gives me an old-fashioned case of the holiday “blues” when Christmas comes around and feels blah.

As many people do, I have some magical memories of Christmas.

We were poor when I was young and didn’t get many presents, but I loved the lights and candles, the greenery and tinsel, and watching as happy friends and family laughed and sang Christmas songs around the piano. We were surrounded by the aromas and flavors of cookies, fruitcake, minced meat pies, and eggnog while the older generation relived stories of Christmases past.

Christmases remained special when I had children of my own. But then I started “losing” Christmas as my children moved out and had families of their own, and my parents…