Surviving The Holidays: Part 1 - The Holidays Aren't Jolly for Everyone

From the time I was five, right up until my mid-teens, Christmas felt less like celebration and more like something I had to survive.

People who know me now sometimes joke that I’m the Grinch of the group. I understand the jokes. I even laugh at some of them, and to an extent I agree. But the truth beneath the green fur hits a lot closer to the heart.

During those years:

• My parents split, and the season turned into a competition, not connection.🎁 Gifts became trophies.🎁 Christmas morning felt like comparison day.🎁 Visits felt like tug-of-war.🎁 Cheers felt choreographed, scored, and silently stressful.

• Family gatherings came with an emotional Jenga tower of expectations, performance, and tension.

• And all of it happened while I was holding a secret that was never mine to hold — a family member who was sexually assaulting me during holiday visits.

  
  

The season that outsiders saw as cozy was tied to moments where my body was in fight-or-flight, while my face had to smile and pretend everything was fine.

Christmas didn’t make my heart race from wonder — it made it race from worry, masking, and unspeakable overwhelm. Back then, silence was safety. Smiling was survival. And the lights I remember most weren’t on the tree — they were the ones I stared at, willing myself to leave my body less, feel less, remember less, and cope more.

Trauma doesn’t take seasonal vacations. And neither does the nervous system’s memory. For a long time, I believed that not liking Christmas meant I was defective, dramatic, or too sensitive.

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The “You’ll Come Around” Myth (…and the things that make me want to hiss at mistletoe)

Something else I didn’t realize until adulthood was how often people try to prescribe festive feelings like seasonal vitamins:

• “Oh, you’ll learn to like Christmas eventually.”

• “Come on, it’s different when you’re older!”

• “Just fake it for the kids.”

• “Decorations are the best part, though, right?”

• “Don’t be a Grinch, join the fun!”

(…and 50 other well-meaning but slightly unhinged variations.)

I know people say these things with love, nostalgia, or playful teasing. But for me, every line lands like:

• You’re doing December wrong.

• Your feelings are inconvenient.

• Everybody else should feel merry, so you should too.

• We don’t want the real history, we want the highlight reel.

And honestly? It cranks my anxiety up even louder.

Because here’s the question I keep coming back to:

Why do I have to like Christmas?! Why is my healing the only thing that’s expected to “bend” in this season?!

When you’ve lived through holiday harm, cheer isn’t a switch. It’s a trigger.

Even something as simple and socially acceptable as decorating can bring up a visceral reaction for me. Putting up ornaments, lights, or wreaths sometimes makes my skin feel too tight, like my body is trying to eject itself from the room.

Decorations don’t feel jolly to me. They feel like the emotional equivalent of:

• wrapping paper over wounds that weren’t allowed to breathe

• glitter on a story nobody realized needed rescuing

• a chrome-and-velvet pressure cooker of expectation

• performative peace in spaces where peace wasn’t actually present

And I know this sounds dramatic, but it’s just body memory speaking the only language it ever got allowed to speak back then. Even now, if someone mentions “festive décor,” my nervous system tends to whisper back: “No thanks, my body remembers December differently.”

Plus...Glitter??? Ew.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s reindeer parade. I’m trying to stop raining on myself.

And maybe someone reading this needs to hear that too.

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Now I know what it really meant:

✅ I was paying attention to the body before I had words for it

✅ I was emotionally aware when awareness wasn’t safe

✅ I was boundary-wired, not broken

✅ I was healing, long before healing was a path I knew existed

It isn’t the job of the healed to cosplay holiday joy just because the calendar demands it.

Your triggers don’t make you miserable. They make you wise. And your boundaries aren’t anti-Christmas — they’re pro-you.

So if the season feels loud, performative, scary, or skin-crawly to you too, know this:

You don’t have to “come around.” You don’t have to “pretend harder.” You don’t have to decorate your wounds or your house to make others feel comfortable.

Your healing is valid even if your holidays are non-traditional, minimal, or emotionally quiet.

And if December is too shiny and loud… the most sacred decoration you might choose this year is simply:

A calm nervous system. A protected heart. A gentler story.

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This series of Surviving the Holiday blogs, we’re going to unbox all of this together: the masking, the pressure, the grief, the uneasy gift dynamics, and the sensory overwhelm — and look at what actually helps us restore ourselves when the world keeps yelling “jolly!”

Eventually, I learned this too:

• You don’t have to love the holidays to love your life

• You don’t have to bond through tradition if tradition once meant harm

• You can rewrite the season into something that doesn’t compete, compare, or consume you

• Boundaries can be wrapped in compassion

• Healing can be the North Star on top of your tree

• Calm is allowed to be the loudest thing in your season, even when it whispers

For those who find December triggering rather than tender, the holidays can feel like:

• grief that doesn’t fit into greeting cards

• estrangement that feels louder when others gather

• generosity that once felt graded instead of freely given

• vulnerability that feels terrifying, especially around gifts

• and pressure to perform joy in a body that remembers harm

Let’s normalize this:

You are not the “Grinch.” You are the one who lived through what nobody else saw. Your caution is not cold — it’s wisdom.

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Over the Next Few Weeks…

This Surviving The Holidays blog series, I’ll be breaking down:

• The emotional and psychological imprints of trauma during the holidays

• The impact of masking and survival coping mechanisms

• The discomfort of gift dynamics after conditional love

• The nervous system’s response to triggering seasons

• The hidden strength of no contact, rewritten tradition, and gentle celebration

And if you’re a sensitive soul, like I was (and still am), we’ll talk about how to:

• honour your peace without apology

• celebrate in ways that don’t betray your body

• give and receive with boundaries instead of pressure

• and create safety in a season that once felt unsafe

We’ll unpack the impacts of trauma during the holidays one piece at a time, and explore new ways to move through this season with awareness, gentleness, and self-possession.

No glitter required!