Christmas has always been my season. I'm the person who starts humming along to holiday playlists in November, who wants the tree up early, who genuinely loves the rituals and the coziness and the magic of it all. But over the last few years, I kept noticing something: almost every Christmas felt a little off. It's not that they were bad, just sort of funky.
Now that I have kids, that "funky Christmas" pattern bothered me even more. I want to fully enjoy the holidays with them. I don't want to be creating new traditions while some old, invisible emotional thread tugs at me. So I decided to get curious about it and try to understand where this feeling came from.
A few weeks ago, I was doing a To Be Magnetic meditation on anxiety, and the prompt was something like: When was the first time you felt this way? I assumed my mind would go back ten years ago, because that was when my dog Maui—my soulmate in animal form—was diagnosed with a medical condition on Christmas Eve. That Christmas was heartbreaking. For years afterward, I assumed that was the root of the heaviness I sometimes felt around the holiday.
But in the meditation, something completely unexpected surfaced. A memory from when I was three or four years old—my earliest memory, actually. My grandmother's fiancé had passed away, someone I apparently liked a lot even though I have no real memory of him except his death. I saw myself as a little girl, crying so hard I couldn't breathe, my dad holding me next to the Christmas tree. He pointed to the star on top and said, "Whenever you think of Jerry, look at that star." He meant it as comfort, and I love how sweet my dad is. But my young brain linked Christmas with grief before I even understood what grief was. It was wild to realize that the feeling didn't start with adulthood or even with Maui's illness—it went all the way back to that moment.
