The Seasons of Christmas

Who I Was, Who I Became, Who I Am Now

Last Christmas nearly broke me.

It was the first holiday season in my adult life that my daughter wasn’t with us for the holidays. She and her new husband were taking their honeymoon over Christmas, and the announcement hit me like a sucker punch.

They’d already spent Thanksgiving with his family. Two holidays in a row without her. My son and his wife would join us, and I was truly grateful, but grief comes in all sizes. It doesn’t care that you read all the “raise independent kids” books and swore you’d never be this mother. It arrives uninvited, at inconvenient hours, while you’re trying to behave like an adult and not become sour, or worse, menacing.

And yes, I know: In the hierarchy of holiday pain, “my grown child is happy and away” is a luxury problem. So many women I love are facing the holidays with no partner, no children, no money, a new diagnosis, a fresh loss, or a family that’s unsafe to be around. But even in a “good” life, the way the holidays rearrange your identity can knock you flat.

I spent the season trying not to spiral, trying not to complain, trying not to be the mother who guilt‑trips her kids for growing up—and failed. My friends were tired of hearing me unpack it. Strangers within earshot were drafted into the discourse.

I was learning, painfully, that the holidays aren’t just about celebration. They’re about identity. They’re about belonging. They’re about who we are when the chairs around the table shift.

I hated how hard it hit me. I hated how small I felt, how much I wanted to hold on tighter instead of letting go. But it was a turning point. A season shift. Because when you raise children well enough that they build their own lives, the reward is distance. They don’t stay.

You don’t get to keep them.

Last year, I wasn’t ready. This year, I am—because every woman’s holiday story starts somewhere.

The Christmas I Inherited

I grew up in a house where magic and chaos lived side by side. Back then, I thought it was all perfectly normal. And maybe it was.

My mother was a hoarder. I’ve written about this before. And not the charming kind, but the kind that required carving pathways through stacked rooms just to reach the table. Christmas meant clearing, hiding, rearranging, pretending everything was fine while praying nothing collapsed—literally.

Yet somehow, every year, we pulled it off. Holidays in the humble Dutch colonial home I grew up in were a bit smoke and mirrors held together with a lot of hiding crap in the sun porch and a surge of last‑minute hustle. It took three generations of women to hold it all together. No one called it emotional labor. They just called it being a good woman.

By 4 o’clock on Christmas Eve, I’d be stationed at the front window with my sister, waiting for my grandparents’ 1969 blue Buick Electra to pull up at the curb. They’d carry in cardboard boxes filled with pierogies, warm rye bread, and mushroom barley soup so heavy it bowed the box. My grandmother was stern, unsentimental, and never baked a thing in her life, but she taught me the most enduring truth I have: Food is love, food is language, food is memory.

Christmas Eve meant roasted chicken for my Nana’s birthday. Christmas Day meant standing rib roast, a financial stretch, with mashed potatoes, string beans, and bread. This was no frills. Heat, noise, and family.

I remember toys strewn across the living room floor, my father sprawled on the floor assembling something, the pets weaving between our feet, and the house crackling with firelight. I remember believing it was almost perfect.

As I look back now, I don’t remember my mother laughing. Ever. Mostly, I remember her looking tired and side‑eyeing the stack of dirty dishes, wondering if my dad would step up. (He did).

Now I understand why.

She was producing the magic and performing the joy. Like so many of us. There was no room in the family budget for the thoughtful gifts she purchased, but everyone would notice if she stopped.

The Christmas I Built

By the time I married at 23, I was determined to rewrite the narrative. My way. No chaos. No clutter. No shame. My holiday vision was inspired by Martha Stewart. I studied her style, clipped her recipes, and wanted so badly to wake up in her world of holiday magic. My holiday prep was crisp, curated, and controlled: coordinated wrapping paper, matching pajamas, monogrammed stockings, trees so tall we needed ladders, tables staged with printed menus just like the magazine pages I obsessed over. If my childhood Christmases were a mix of nostalgia and survival, my adult Christmases were control. Curated perfection to prove that I could entertain just like Martha.

When the kids were little, those years were magic.

Santa footprints on the hearth.
Stockings sagging from the weight.
Wide‑eyed belief at dawn as my son and daughter tumbled down the stairs in their matching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle jammies with glee to see what Santa left them.

By the time the kids were four and six, we were on the move. Literally. We lived all over the world—California, Texas, Russia, Kazakhstan, Norway. We improvised traditions at embassy tables and in strangers’ dining rooms. And through it all, the invisible labor fell on me, as it does to nearly every woman I know. My husband handled tasks; I held the responsibility.

The remembering, the anticipating, the preventing disappointment. Every detail lived in my nervous system, not his calendar.

I was trying to outrun my past and choreograph my future, and I thought I was mostly successful.

And then the future arrived as I always dreamed it would—with an expanded family, filled with love.

The Christmas I’m Learning to Release

Nobody tells you how much the holidays will change when your children become adults. Suddenly you’re negotiating like diplomats: alternate dates and years, split loyalties, swallowed expectations. Suddenly you’re grieving things that aren’t tragedies—an empty seat at the table, a stocking placement, a year you don’t get.

And it isn’t just about kids. Women around me are grieving Christmases that never happened: the child they couldn’t have, the partner who left, the parents whose dementia stole the rituals, the friend who isn’t coming back, the income that vanished. We’re all carrying some version of an empty chair.

Last year stunned me. I didn’t want to be the mother who cried about empty seats. I was. I didn’t want to resent choices that made perfect sense. I did.

Apparently evolution requires surrender.

No one warns you how much it can feel like choking.

But surrender is the only thing that makes room for what’s next.

The Christmas You Grow Into

This year, everything is different. We have two baby grandsons—one eight months, one three months—and the house is full again. Not the same full. A new full. A full built on adjustment and humility.

My son has declared that Christmas morning will always be in his home. I’m proud of him for drawing that line and mildly offended it cuts through my calendar. My daughter will alternate years with her in‑laws. Sometimes we’ll sleep under one roof. Sometimes we won’t.

Christmas has become a negotiation of presence instead of proof.

And I’m learning to say less.
To welcome without crowding.
To love without possession.
To be the elder without becoming the martyr.

It’s harder than it sounds.

But when I walk past the four new stockings on the mantel, two of them tiny ones—something inside me settles. I feel the arrival. I feel the lineage. And I think of women spending Christmas, or any holiday, in quiet apartments, on night shifts, in hospital rooms, on beaches alone by choice, or lighting candles for those who won’t be back.

There is no one right Christmas.

There is only who we are becoming, season after season.