An Unconventional Holiday Season

Last Passover, my mom, my sister and I sat at our kitchen table and ate thick slices of New York pizza.

“We are bad Jews,” my mom said, taking a bite of the forbidden crust. We laughed, but this statement was nothing new to us. She had voiced similar comments before, at other unconventional dinners, on other unconventional holidays.

My parents separated when I was 12 years old, a few days before Thanksgiving. I remember eating dinosaur nuggets on our cold kitchen floor with my older sister and her best friend, wondering what the holiday season would look like with this new severed version of our family.

At the time, I was the only kid in my sixth-grade class whose parents were not together. In our tight-knit Jewish community, the pressures of convention still reigned supreme.

There were many holiday seasons after that where my family would play make-believe — squeezing into button-up shirts and navy dresses, stuffing stale kugel and sour cranberry sauce into our mouths in order to fit into some other family’s picturesque Hannukah or Thanksgiving.

The holidays are about celebrating family and fullness, so I understand and appreciate what prompted my parents to fit into the version provided to us. But of course, those gatherings always felt forced — tense and unnatural — and I began to dread the string of weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

The “holiday blues” has now become a known phenomenon — WebMD and the national suicide prevention line seasonally put out articles on how to cope with holiday-related depression and anxiety. They warn against behaviors like over-eating and over-drinking. But it runs so much deeper.

The longstanding traditions associated with the American holiday season are exclusionary by nature. Through holiday rituals, society continually affirms that being in a conventional family structure is what makes people happiest. So many of these rituals also imply the need for travel, limitless leisure time and a disposable income in order to fit in. Anything short is criticized — no family holiday card? No celebratory thanksgiving meal? No fancy presents? No Christmas vacation? Always a faux paus.

For many reasons this year, these larger societal traditions are being tested. What are the holidays about when stripped of the giant family reunions and fancy getaways?

This will be my first holiday season without my mom. I’ve avoided writing that sentence for months. Last Thanksgiving, my sister and I sat in a cold hospital waiting room with protective gowns and plastic masks on so that we could visit her one last time.

This year, I’m thinking of the many other people that will be in sterile hospital waiting rooms, chilly cemeteries or alone in their overheated studio apartments, unable to get on a plane to see friends or family.

I keep going back to last year in the hospital waiting room that I sat in. I felt like I was 12 years old again — waiting for some holiday magic to erase my reality, only to be met with disappointment and then shame as I scrolled through the collages of happy families on Instagram.

Of course, I’d rather have been anywhere than in that hospital for the holidays last year. Of course, I’ve done everything I can to avoid the overwhelming emptiness this year that will surely come with no longer having my mother and my spiritual home. Of course, so many of us are frantically scrambling to carry on some sense of tradition during such an uncertain time. Sometimes those traditions can serve us, but they can also make us miss something.

Sometimes those traditions can serve us, but they can also make us miss something

After those years of play-pretend with my parents before my mom got sick, something quite wonderful began to happen — my mom started to create new, odd traditions, just for us.

I think the first time was a Thanksgiving when I was in high school, when only my mom and I lived at home. We decided to skip the dinner we’d been invited to and instead order Chinese food and watch romcoms in her bed late into the night. It was chilly, pitch-black by six o’clock, but warmth streamed into our house. I remember my mom was oddly giddy, child-like. Looking back, I see this as the first time she could really release those societal pressures and just do as she pleased.

With her new sense of freedom came a new light.

After that, there was the Christmas that my older sister, my mom and I got drunk on margaritas and gossiped about our burgeoning love lives. The Hanukkah where we ate flaming cheese and danced, uninhibited, at a Greek restaurant. There was the Friendsgiving where the women drank wine and ate cheese, while the men waited on us — preparing meatballs and pastas and chocolatey desserts.

Even though I had some lingering sense telling me that these events were not the “right” way to celebrate, those unconventional moments were the fullest I’ve felt during a time where there is so much pressure to feel and be a certain way.

I know that my mom was always insecure about the non-traditional way we did things in our family, comparing us to the rest of our community. But those odd memories are the ones that I cherish most. They were most emblematic of my mother at her core — authentic, fun-loving, whimsical, wacky.

In order to sink into what the holidays should really be about — inclusion, compassion, love — we need to shed traditions that don’t work for us and accept that there is no “right” way.

I’ve already begun to feel bouts of grief as the holidays approach. It’s all the little things — seeing the cornbread mix my mom used on the display shelves at Trader Joe’s, hearing “Love Actually” come on the TV, baking compost holiday cookies in our kitchen without her.

It is easy to sink into the simple devastation of all that’s been lost this holiday season. It is easier still to try to push loss away and force old conventions. But as I move through the natural waves of sorrow and joy and then sorrow again, I find that the answers always lie somewhere in between.

Perhaps this holiday season, we can accept what is missing and also throw out conventions that didn’t serve us to begin with. Find something unexpected in the nooks and crannies of tradition.

… Maybe even go get some Chinese food on Thanksgiving. And simply appreciate that we are here.

Rebecca Katz just received her master’s in Journalism from USC Annenberg. She works in audio journalism and is in the works of starting her own podcast. twitter:@rebeccaerinkatz.