It's okay if you hate this time of year

And our non-Thanksgiving dinner tradition

This is an autobiographical comic. When I was 4, these were the first words out of my mouth on Christmas morning. The holidays: a disappointment from the jump!¹

November 20th through January 1st, the holiday season, is also the season of peak dissonance between what dominant American culture tells us we’re supposed to be feeling (joy!), and what lots of us are actually feeling (fuck!). There are a million reasons why the holidays can be hard; a lot of them are about external things like consumerism, over-scheduling, and pressure. And a lot of them are about painful emotions, like grief or loneliness, feeling particularly sharp and dark against all the twinkle lights.

But there’s another reason this time of year can feel crushing. It happens in our heads and it sounds like this: “This is supposed to be a time of joyful togetherness. Look at all these other people doing joyful togetherness! But I’m not feeling it, I hate this, why is my family so dysfunctional, why am I such a mess, everyone else seems to love this and I don’t, something must be wrong with me.”