How to Spend Christmas Day Alone

What is it like to spend Christmas Day alone?

There are many circumstances that would account for being alone on Christmas Day.

• Like me, your husband might work in the Emergency Room which never closes, including on Christmas Day. My kids are grown and celebrating Christmas with their in-laws today.
• Or, you might be alone because you don’t celebrate Christmas and this is just another Thursday.
• But you might be alone because your family is estranged and it doesn’t feel comfortable to be with a friend’s family because you feel like the fifth wheel.

If that last circumstance is the reason you’re alone today, you might feel lonely. Or left out. Being alone when everyone else is together is a weird feeling.

We all hate to be left out.

Today, I’m going to tell you the story of loneliness in my life with the hope that, if you are lonely, you will know you’re not alone in feeling that way.

Then I’m going to tell you a story of hope. These days aloneness is one of my favorite things. But I didn’t always feel that way. I found a bridge between loneliness and alone-ness and I healed the brokenness inside me as I crossed that bridge.

I hope to bring you comfort today if you’re alone and lonely.

 

What is loneliness?

First, I want to dispel the myth that just because you’re around a lot of people means you can’t be lonely. Decades ago, when I was a little girl, I spent half of Christmas Day with my mom and the other half with my dad. There were lots of people and commotion in both houses, but no matter which house I was in, I felt a huge pit of emptiness in my stomach.

Something was missing. Even as a very little girl, I could tell that my life felt broken.

We all experience a feeling of brokenness to one degree or another. When have you felt left out or left behind? It might be temporary like when you were sick and you could hear everyone else going on with their day.

Or the brokenness you feel might be for the rest of your life because you lost a child, or your mom died and your mom was your very best friend on earth.

We have all experienced that feeling of something’s broken. Or something’s missing. And you’re the one on the outside, looking into a scene that seems like everyone else belongs.

After those little-girl-Christmases, I spent the next 4 decades healing that dark, lonely feeling. I’m not telling you this because I want you to feel sorry for me, but rather so that you will know that, if you feel this way, you are not alone.

 

Here’s what loneliness felt like for me. I hope you can hear yourself in my story.

I enjoyed the Christmas decorating and baking cookies with my mom because I never really had a ritual like that with my dad, so I didn’t feel anything missing. But as Christmas Eve approached, I’d feel this blackness begin to coat the inside of my body. It was so empty. Cavernous. That spooky feeling in a cave where you can’t see the back wall because it’s so dark.

The darkness was accentuated because of the spirit of joy and sleigh bells all around me. It was as if the bells were mocking my darkness, taunting me that everyone else is merry and gay.

That juxtaposition made my cave even darker. And emptier. And no one could see my emptiness because I pretended to be merry as best I could. I was a little girl, and Christmas is all about the happiness of children. Without anyone saying anything, I could feel the burden of people relying on my happiness.

There were moments of joy. I remember the first year we got candy stuffed stockings at my father’s house. It was sort of a miracle because my stepmother bought Toner’s peanut butter and carob chips. Sugar was rarely seen, let alone consumed.

I remember feeling such a bond with my step siblings while we pulled candy bars and books of lifesavers out of our stockings.

But there was always the inevitable moment when I would leave those siblings behind to return to my mother’s home. I felt safer with my mother. But I also felt left out, like the 5 of them: my father, my stepmother and my step-siblings were building a family where I was the occasional interrupter to the rhythm they were building.

During the first years I spent with my husband, I warned him about my Christmas loneliness. “I’ve got the lonely feeling today,” I’d say. The lonely feeling wasn’t reserved for Christmas. Sunday evening was another time that the dark cave would descend.

Do you ever feel this sort of loneliness? What is the texture and color of your loneliness? Is your loneliness an empty cave like mine? Or is it more like a drowning feeling under water? Or an untethered feeling like you’re far out at sea and can’t find a shoreline?

 

It can be difficult to locate your loneliness

I notice with my clients that it helps to identify the specifics of your feeling. Especially to locate it in your body, then notice what the place is like where you “go” when you’re lonely. Many times I’ve taken clients on visualizations of their lonely place.

Inevitably, when my client is ready to explore the place that haunts them so much, we find something beautiful there.

I once went on a visualization with a client who felt unmoored in her loneliness moments. She could see the shoreline, but couldn’t reach it. Wave after wave swept over her head and she couldn’t catch her breath.

I sat there with her, and watched as her breathing was shallow and shaky. I reminded her that, while her feelings are very real, can she also feel the gravity of the chair enfolding her in my office? She acknowledged that she could feel both things: the overwhelming waves and the certainty of gravity that my office had come to offer her.

I invited her to dive deeper into this ocean.

She resisted at first, “Are you kidding me?” she said, “I can barely catch my breath as it is.”

I reminded her of the chair in which she was seated. I invited her to take a deep breath and inhale the scent of my grapefruit candle.

“Can you feel how safe you are in this space?” I asked her. Her eyes were closed, but she nodded.

“There’s no pressure to do anything at all.” I said. “You are welcome to keep surfing your way to the top of each wave where you can find your breath. I’ll stay here with you.”

Then I took a deeply audible breath. As I exhaled, I invited her again, “If you want to, you can take a deep breath of this grapefruit flavored air, and carry that air deep into the water with you.” We practiced a couple deep breaths. “Inhale,” I coached her. “Blow that air out as if you’re bending the flame on a candle.”

“Inhale again,” I continued, “And, as you exhale, see if you can keep that flame bent over, but don’t let it go out. Just bend the flame.”

At this point my client’s body was visibly relaxing. Her shoulders came down and her long, dangly earrings no longer touched her white fleece sweater.

“OK,” she said, “I’m ready to dive down.” She took a long inhale that wobbled a bit with the uncertainty of what she would find below her in the water of her loneliness.

And then she dove. Seated in that cozy chair in my office, I watched as her imagination went deep into the frigid depths of her fear. Of her loneliness. Of all that she had resisted.

Her breathing got more steady. I watched as her belly filled with air. The fingers on her right hand that had been fiddling with the rings on her left hand, softened.

Stillness.

Two more breaths.

Then she opened her eyes and looked straight at me, “It’s so peaceful under the water,” she told me. “There are beautiful, colorful fish swimming so gracefully. There are bouquets and bouquets of coral. Every color you can imagine. But it’s all so quiet. Quietly peaceful.”

She was surprised by this. Surprised by the beauty. Surprised by the peace.

But I wasn’t surprised.

This is what I found myself at the blackest part of my loneliness cave. In the darkness so thick I couldn’t see my own hand. I found a deep peace descend over me. A peace that doesn’t need to see to feel safe. The peace of surrender. I welcomed my black emptiness and the irony is that it nourished me.

 

Acceptance is the bridge out of loneliness

Our most painful feelings originate because we are resisting something.

Resisting loneliness for example, or resisting anger. Resisting helplessness or even resisting love.

Over and over and over I’ve had the privilege to watch people stop resisting the worst feelings that terrify them, and I get to see this look come over their face: surprise followed by relief followed by surrender. Acceptance. Even a deep sense of belonging.

This lack of resistance—this acceptance—is the bridge out of loneliness and into a deep sense of wholeness inside yourself.

When we don’t look away from our deepest pains; when we stop trying to catch our breath between the waves of overwhelm, we can dive into our own deep sea of belonging.

We belong first to ourselves. To the totality of what we feel.

 

A breathing exercise to build the bridge

I invite you to light a candle of hope. Will yours be scented grapefruit like mine? Or is your candle sandalwood, or maybe it has the scent of the sea. Or maybe it is just a leftover birthday candle because the last person in your family to have a birthday wasn’t old enough to use the whole pack.

Let this candle help you find your breath as you inhale deeply, then bend your flame so you can see your breath. Let yourself see your breath bend that flame over and over until you feel fortified to explore your dark cave, your deep sea, or whatever other form your loneliness takes.

Trust yourself. Trust your breath.

Trust yourself to stop resisting. Emotions are scary because it feels like they will swallow us up. But, like my client, seated in the chair in my office, let yourself notice the safety of the space you’re in right now. Let yourself notice the gravity of your current situation.

Notice how you have something to eat. Notice how you are warm inside your home. Notice the clothes you’re wearing and the way they feel on your skin. Notice the sun that is warming this earth. Notice the oxygen all around you that you did nothing to create. Notice that you have enough. Enough for THIS moment.

Then bring all that enoughness to your resistance. Let the sun melt your resistance. Let your breath inhale and then exhale that loneliness. Let your enoughness give you courage to walk into the darkest part of your cave. Let your enoughness give you courage to dive down deep into the sea below you.

Notice your breath in that place. Notice how you can still breathe.

Bring your candle to that place, and inhale. Then, as you exhale, bend that candle flame. Watch as your breath might blow the flame out. Notice how little effort it takes to light the candle to try again.

As you experiment with your candle in this place of loneliness, notice how it might be difficult to keep your breath centered on the flame.

Notice how many times you blow the candle out.

This is natural. You’re finding your breath. You’re finding your breath in the midst of that place where you have been terrified to go. Be patient with yourself.

Let yourself light the candle again. And again.

Notice how many times you need to relight that candle. Notice how you’re able to relight the candle.

There will come a time when bending the candle flame helps to calm you. Recenter you. Ground you. I promise you. It just takes practice.

There might be tears. There will almost certainly be fears. But remember, you are safe inside your skin. You are able to build a bridge over your brokenness.

There’s no rush.

Flame by flame. Breath by breath. You are building your bridge.

Each time you visit your loneliness, you are healing it. This is your bridge: from loneliness to that expansive feeling of I am alone, but I am whole.

 

Cultivate joy inside your loneliness

After you’ve let yourself explore that spot, come with me into the years I practiced ritual after ritual that healed my lonely feeling. Because, while it did take many years for my lonely feeling to recede, I can also tell you that it has been decades since my Christmas day has been haunted by that dark, empty cave in my belly.

This part of my story is about leaning into joy. Finding what makes me feel organically joy-filled. Joy is that combination emotion that encompasses happiness, wholeness, belonging, and hope. Joy is a muscle. It needs a workout to get stronger and more reliable.

During the darkest years of my loneliness, both of my parents taught me to practice joy.

What is interesting to me was that, even as a little girl, I could feel how lonely they both were. But I could also feel them reaching for the joy-ladder that would help them—and me—climb out of that pit of despair. I was lucky to have such loving parents.

They loved me enough to include me in their loneliness while teaching me to cultivate joy. When you learn to cultivate joy in the midst of that existential angst that we all feel at one time or another, your joy will become reliable.

When you ignore, bury, distract, or refuse to see your loneliness, that haunting feeling gets bigger and more powerful. Simultaneously, your joy will feel farther and farther away and you will have trouble finding it.

 

A ritual that healed my lonely feeling

One of the ways my mother practiced cultivating joy was making sand castles with me. Just off the laundry room in my childhood home, there was a door to our garage and just inside the garage, at the bottom of a 2-step staircase, we had a cardboard box filled with sand. We had a spray bottle and my mother sprayed the sand with water while I dug my 6-year-old fingers into the sand and mixed it and mixed it until the grains of sand stuck together in little chunks.

We stood up, went up the tiny set of stairs and into the kitchen where my mother had dedicated an old pan with gold and red flowers on the bottom to the wax melting for our candle making. Into the pan went three chunks of white paraffin. Paraffin was new to both of us.

Paraffin is a waxy substance that melts when you heat it. We heated it slowly, and while we waited, we stepped back out to the garage. Down the two steps we went, and we both put our fingers into the sand. We carved out a big bowl shape, then, at the bottom of the bowl, we dug three tunnels into the sand. “These will be the legs that will hold the candle up,” my mother told me.

Up the two steps we went again to check on the melting paraffin. When the chunks were all melted, my mother brought out a small sheet that contained colorful chunks. They reminded me of the bubble gum I punched out the backside. Some of the chunks were green. Some of the chunks were red. These magic little chunks would add color to our paraffin which, now melted, was clear.

I chose green and we punched out two of the chunks. As these waxy green chunks melted, a ribbon of color infiltrated the clear paraffin. We were silent, my mother and I, just watching the ribbons of green melt their way into the clear wax.

“Would you like to stir it?” my mother asked me. Yes. I wanted to stir. But I stirred slowly, so I could watch that green slowly paint all that clear wax. While we were united, watching the magic trick of green make its way through all that paraffin, I felt a moment, just a brief moment, of respite from the loneliness.

My mother looked me in the eye. We both smiled. Then, together, we looked at the liquid green again. We were both lonely. But we were also together.

My mother carried the hot pan from the kitchen through the laundry room where I opened the door to the garage. She descended the steps first, then me. She poured all that hot, green paraffin into the carved-out sand we’d dug with our hands.

Over the cardboard box my mother placed a stick. Onto the stick was tied three wicks. She dangled those wicks down into the wax until they reached the sand.

“Now we wait,” she said. We needed to wait for the wax to cool. Waiting was the hardest part. Waiting is when the emptiness returned. I was lucky that day because my mother helped me know what to do with the emptiness. She motioned me back up the steps.

We walked through the laundry room, through the kitchen, and into the dining room where she had a little sack from the hobby store. Inside the sack there were figurines. “We can put them into the candle when it gets firm enough.” We sat there at the big table where I never remember my family eating together. The room reserved for visitors.

My mom and I were visiting our future. Our future without my dad living there. Our future where my older brother and sister were so grown that they had their own places to be. Our future that, in that moment, felt so broken to both of us.

We didn’t talk about the loneliness. But I could feel it. She did me the favor of not denying the loneliness she felt as well while we sorted through the figurines in silence.

My favorite figurine was the green elf. He had red and white stripped tights. There was a mushroom too. And something that looked like seaweed, but filled the space between the elf and the mushroom nicely. I moved the elf to the middle of the seaweed. Then back again. We added another mushroom to our scene, then took it away.

Back and forth we moved things, occasionally getting up to walk through the kitchen and down the steps to check the texture of the wax. “I think it’s still too soupy,” my mother said, “Let’s give it a bit more time.”

Finally, on our third trip into the garage, my mother decided it was time. I ran to grab the elf, the mushroom, and the seaweed. We had decided how we wanted them laid out, and so my mother let me punch them down into the wax just enough that they would stick in the still-soft paraffin turned green to show off the elf.

In the morning, my mother woke me up saying, “Our candle is all hardened up. Would you like to pull it out of the box?”

There it was again: that brief moment of hope in the midst of the deep cave of lonely despair. Yes! I wanted to see what the candle would reveal. I walked down the many stairs from my bedroom to the kitchen, then out through the laundry room, down the two steps and dug my hands into the sand.

It was a magic trick! That hole we dug last night turned into a candle with three chunky, sandy legs at the base this morning. I pulled it all the way out and my mother used an old basting brush to brush off all the sand that wouldn’t stick. We took it to the coffee table in front of the couch and lit the three wicks.

My mother showed me how to reach for joy. 2 steps at a time. Down into the concrete floor of the garage, then back to the kitchen stove. I sorted through my loneliness as my hands held a mushroom, an elf, and a piece of seaweed.

 

Another lesson about loneliness

My father was exceedingly lonely during those days after his divorce. He was a philosopher who read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. I remember, as a very little girl, him talking to me about “existential angst.” So, even as a child, I knew that the loneliness I felt inside wasn’t unique to me. It was something all of humanity dealt with.

Those existential philosophers were willing—at least at an intellectual level—to lean into the loneliness. To normalize it. And to talk about its impact on the way we live our lives.

The lesson I took from my father was best illustrated by the way he played Monopoly with me. He and I played Monopoly on Sunday afternoons, right before he’d return me to my mother’s house. Yes, we were playing a game, but our game was always infused with a dread that soon we would be apart again.

We never spoke about our shared sadness at the separation, but it was there, haunting the room with every roll of the dice. With every turn we took we both felt that moment coming closer. The moment when he would drop me off at the bottom of my mother’s driveway.

Each goodbye ached.

I’m a grown up now. And I can give words to what I only felt in those moments at the bottom of the driveway. My father’s ache was flavored with guilt: guilt that he couldn’t make it work with my mother. Regret that he was giving me a fatherless childhood even though, as a fatherless boy himself, he’d sworn not to do that when he grew up.

I didn’t feel fatherless. In fact, my father was probably the most influential person in my life. with each passing year of my adulthood, I understand what was lost in the cavernous loneliness we both felt: life comes with hurt. We want to blame. To find fault for what hurts with a hope we can call it WRONG and by naming it as wrongness it will go away.

But my father didn’t do anything wrong. He was trying his best. Trying to love me and care for himself.

Each time our Monopoly game looked like it was coming to an end because he was out of money, he would shout out, “The bank is going out of business and giving everyone $500!”

My father ran out of money because he’d accept my ridiculous trades like, “I’ll give you this monopoly of Water Works and The Electric Company if you give me your Boardwalk and Parkplace monopoly.” He accepted every trade I proposed, giggling the whole time. And then he kept our game going when he’d land on my Boardwalk property complete with hotel because he wrote his own rules when it came to joy.

 

What is the birthplace of your loneliness? What is your bridge to joy?

I did a little research about Nietzsche as I was writing this podcast and I found this quote, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” My father was a bridge for me during those years of loneliness. A bridge who showed me that joy is something you invent. You cultivate.

I continued to build that bridge. I borrowed from my mother and made things when I was lonely, finding the two steps up and the two steps down. I borrowed from my father and made up my own rules for life, laughing at the bankruptcies and starting the game over on my own terms.

My parent’s divorce was the birthplace of my dark cave of loneliness. But each of my parents also taught me to search for the bridge to joy. To build that bridge myself.

Because of their divorce, I have a unique ability to see the seeds of joy in the soil of sorrow.

What about you? What is the birthplace of your loneliness? How is your loneliness a bridge to joy? When you learn to forge your own joy, no one can take it from you. Ever. Who are the people that have pointed the way for you? Who taught you to make a candle out of sand? Who gave you permission to rewrite the rules of the game?

I often wonder who taught my mother? Who taught my father? If they were alive for me to ask them, would they tell me, “You, sweet little Becky Sue. I learned to build my bridge to joy because I loved you. And because I knew you were watching.”

Here’s an example:

You might find beauty like Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem where he says,
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

It is enough to search for the beauty in brokenness. Let this be your bridge out today. As you ask your brain to find beautiful broken things, you will, simultaneously, and without trying, heal your resistance to the brokenness inside of you.

When that happens—when you begin to see how beautiful brokenness is—you begin to develop a different relationship with your own brokenness. It feels less lonely and more beautiful.

Nothing would make me happier today than if you texted me a photo of the broken beauty you found. You can reach me at 970-210-4480.

A poem to read if you’re alone on Christmas

I’ll end today with this poem from my friend and poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She was a guest on my podcast talking about how the death of her son affected her marriage.

Belonging
And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)