Opting Out Of Christmas

I opted out of Christmas this year. For the last couple of years, I’ve said I didn’t want to do Christmas. I didn’t want to bother about gifts, and I didn’t want to ask for anything. 

Last year, I knew my family had gone all out for me, so I felt the need to reciprocate, and I spent a few hundred dollars that I didn’t have in the first place to buy gifts for everyone. Even then, I felt like I didn’t do enough. I wanted to give them and everyone so much more; they all deserve so much more. 

And though I acknowledge that the desire to spend money I don’t have on everyone to show I love them is just capitalistic conditioning we’ve all been raised on, I still feel guilty about not giving enough to people. Or, in this year’s case, not participating in the holiday as we’re expected to. I just couldn’t do it. 

Holiday Paralysis

This year, leading up to the holidays (and even still), I’ve just felt so exhausted with everything mentally, emotionally, and physically. Even Thanks Giving was a blur. As the days flew by and Christmas grew closer, I grew more exhausted and anxious about everything. I didn’t have the money to get gifts in the first place, and I was really questioning the wisdom of spending money I didn’t have and stressing out all over again. Because once I start buying things for others, it’s hard for me to stop.

This is the first year we didn’t have a Christmas tree, whereas we’d made it a tradition to pick one out every year. I didn’t go Christmas shopping or buy gifts. I couldn’t even get myself to make drawings or paintings for anyone, let alone all of the people I write a list of, naively hoping that I might find the energy to do so.  

As the holiday closed in on me, there wasn’t even time to get a last-minute meaningful gift. And then suddenly, Christmas came. And now it’s passed. 

So this year, I finally did it – I took a break from Christmas. While part of me would have liked to, I just felt physically and mentally paralyzed in a way about it. I’ve felt like I’ve been barely able to function the past two or three months. In a way, it wasn’t necessarily something I chose. I just couldn’t do it. And as I got closer to the holiday, I kind of just gave in and succumbed to the feeling of not caring to celebrate this year. And all the guilt and shame I felt about that couldn’t overcome my exhaustion about everything. Now, that guilt and shame are also fading away as fast as the holiday has passed by. 

What I Did For Christmas Instead

That doesn’t mean I did nothing to celebrate the holiday or what it means to me; I just didn’t do gifts. I didn’t ask for anything.

Moreover, I explicitly told everyone not to get me anything. My mom still bought me stuff, but to reciprocate, she requested me to help with specific things instead of buying her a gift. My partner and I decided to split the cost of getting a Switch to play together. We also went out to a nice dinner and a movie at the drive-in. And I got some Lilo and Stitch PJs for one of my best friends, who gifts me random things throughout the year.

Other than that, there were no presents to open on Christmas morning. No stockings, nothing. 

Instead, we slept in late on Christmas day and got up to play games for a little while and rest. In the evening, my mom and I went over to my sister’s house to have dinner together and watch Encanto. We brought the food and the gifts my mom bought for her. 

Though I told her not to get me anything, my sister’s love language is gift-giving, so she surprised me with a shirt with pictures from ‘White Woman Instagram’ from Bo Burnham’s Inside album and some stickers to go with it. It was nothing crazy, but it meant so much to me after spending the last six months hyper-fixating on the special and the album. So I took her out to dinner this past week as a thank you. 

Other than that, we celebrated by enjoying each other’s company. Instead of buying gifts for everyone, we invited our friends over for a celebration in honor of our friendship. We made lots of food, had people bring drinks and desserts, and shared our time and company together. Honestly, spending time with everyone, watching them all enjoy themselves, and hearing that they enjoyed the food we cooked; that’s better than any gift I could’ve received. 

“Presence, Not Presents”

At the heart of it, this year I focused on “presence, not presents.” I think I did a pretty good job of accomplishing that. Christmas has become so corporatist; I didn’t want to deal with any of it; I didn’t want to feel obligated to just because our culture expects it of me. 

I’m tired of the pressure and stress placed on us to participate by spending money this time of the year. Under normal circumstances, it’s hard enough to live up to the expectations of it all. But we’re in multiple ongoing crises, and that’s just externally, not including anything any one of us is personally dealing with or experiencing. We’re all struggling in one way or another. And I would hate for someone I love to feel stressed about having to budget their expenses on top of getting me something. 

Maybe the best thing we can give each other is the space not to do what our culture obligates us to do during this time of the year. 

Perhaps instead of buying each other the best or most expensive thing or going all out for everyone, stressing ourselves out, we can gift each other our time. Whether that’s our presence to each other (instead of presents), making something with our own hands like art or food, or any other way to show our love and appreciation for each other without spending money we don’t have. 

To shamelessly self-plug, I wrote a series back in 2019 about having a zero-waste holiday. The one covering gifts largely follows a lot of the sentiment I’ve explained here. While a little outdated regarding any relevance to the pandemic, I think it still holds up well. If you’d like to read that, click here.

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Moving Forward

I don’t know what next Christmas season will look like. I don’t know what my finances will be. But I rather enjoyed “not doing Christmas” this year. I feel significantly less stressed than I otherwise would have if I caved and spent money last minute on gifts that might end up being returned or gather dust somewhere anyway. And again, that feeling has overshadowed the shrinking guilt I feel about just throwing my hands up and saying fuck it, I am not doing it this year. 

I think I might not do Christmas from here on out. With saying that, there’s a sense of freedom and of weight lifted that I feel with that conviction. 

And there are probably people out there that if they heard that, they’d probably scream that I’m perpetuating the “war on Christmas” or call me selfish or some other shit. But, in my opinion, maybe it’s time we break this cycle every year of debt and guilt and stress related to a season that’s supposed to be “joyful and merry” or a season of giving in its purest form.

Maybe we can take back the holidays for ourselves and each other. And perhaps we can make the holidays about sharing and coming together as families and communities again. Isn’t that what the “Christmas spirit” is supposed to be all about? That’s what it means to me. So I’m going to work on keeping it that way from here on out.