"My mother, on the other hand, who was born on Christmas Day, always resented sharing her birthday with a divine being. The time my brother, father, and I forgot to put birthday cards on her gifts, she fled into the bedroom and threw herself on her bed, crying. I was 8 and consumed by guilt and shame. I panicked that we had failed her and she'd be inconsolable."
"My friend Ellen's birthday is the day before Halloween. I never remember until the day after Halloween. No one does, she tells me. She doesn't mind, though. She knows that if she wants a celebration, the people who love her will be happy to have one. But she'd just as soon let the holiday happen and have, at most, a quiet dinner with her grown daughters and their partners."
"Unlike my friend, my mother had always felt cheated. For good reason, I would understand later: an impoverished childhood, a father who drank too much, a mother who birthed 10 children and lost six. It didn't help that she'd married at 17 and became a widow at 26, with two children to support and no good way to do that. It took my mother's great strength and determination to make a good life."
Holidays can activate buried emotions, prompting people to mock, dismiss, or minimize celebrations to distance themselves from pain. One person prefers to let birthday and holiday coincide without fuss, opting for a quiet dinner. Another person born on Christmas felt cheated and reacted with intense sadness when family forgot small gestures, reflecting lifelong deprivation, loss, and hardship. Childhood instability and parental struggles can turn holidays into amplifiers of resentment and depression. Anticipation of family holidays can trigger loneliness tied to feeling emotionally isolated within family gatherings, where members inhabit separate bubbles and private emotions sometimes erupt into squabbles. Examining the sources of holiday feelings can reveal unresolved emotions.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]