Oh, However Will We "Survive" the Holidays?
This holiday season, we don't need another "survival guide", but we could all use a healthy serving of perspective.
We all know how incredibly stressful the holiday season is — how horrific it is to spend time with our relatives, how nerve-racking shopping can be, and how the pervading sense of anxiety tinges this whole time of year. Or so we are endlessly told. The cultural cliché of the holidays as a harrowing, high-stress ordeal that we must be mentally prepared to endure has reached the echelon of self-evident truism in America. It’s the subject of inane small talk everywhere, a key feature of seasonal advertising, and a recurring theme on television shows and holiday specials. In fact, it’s become its own movie sub-genre: dysfunctional family holiday movies. A Google search for “survive the holidays” yields 573,000 results, and a search for “holiday survival guide” brings up more than 75,000 pages. Search for either of these without quotation marks and the results climb into the tens of millions. As an editor with several publications, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve edited at least two such “survival guides” that I can recall. We have turned giving thanks and gifts with loved ones into unanesthetized battlefield surgery or a stint in a North Korean prison camp — something that must be survived.
The problem is, this narrative is bullshit. Pure, unadulterated, steaming bullshit collectively laundered into relevance through sheer memetic repetition. This holiday season, I propose a new tradition: let’s have a little perspective and rediscover our grip on fucking reality.
We can first dispense with the most material matters. Shopping has never been easier. There’s a supercomputer in your pocket that anticipates your every desire and can present you with custom-tailored gift recommendations at any price point that can be one-click purchased and delivered the same day. It does everything but shop for you, and, come to think of it, I’m actually not certain that it can’t. For those of you hosting a gathering, cooking, too, has never been easier. No one in human history has ever had access to such a staggering array of labor-saving appliances, once-exotic ingredients, prepared and pre-packaged foods, recipes, and step-by-step video instructions, not to mention AI.1
Of course, these are minor grievances in the holiday stress narrative. The crux of our alleged mass anxiety is having to spend time with relatives — the intolerable ghouls whose mere company threatens to unravel our minds, the great interpersonal menace against which we can only brace ourselves and, with our trusty “survival guides” in hand, hope to endure. It’s worth asking what, specifically, anyone could possibly think must be “survived” about holiday family dinners. You aren't living on the streets facing hunger and hypothermia. You aren’t staring down stage four bone cancer, a category five hurricane, or an aerial bombardment. You’re facing Aunt Pam and her passive-aggressive bullshit, or your cousin Dan and his dumb political opinions. So your uncle voted for Trump. So you grandparents disapprove of your life choices. So your dad is a Bible thumper, or your brother an insufferable blowhard, or your cousin never misses an opportunity to flaunt her success in your face. So what?
Your grandparents or great-grandparents lived through world wars, deadly plagues, economic depressions, and the threat of nuclear war. Some of them lived under repressive despotisms, or as second-class citizens who lacked basic rights. And yet they held their heads high. You, on the other hand, are breaking out in hives three weeks before you have to sit across a table from relatives who give your tattoos a judgy look. Something along the way has gone terribly, terribly wrong. When people mock Western society as soft, fragile, and decadent, these are the kinds of things they’re referring to.
Listening to the same boring stories, politely smiling at lousy advice from people whose lives are in no way worth emulating, and bearing the quiet judgement of folks whose opinions deserve zero respect should be the least of your problems! The notion of going through an entire quarter of the calendar year under a cloud of dread over spending a few hours with these people is a form of insanity. If your relatives are violently angry drunks and your holiday dinners reliably descend into brawling and knife fights, simply don’t go. If your family gatherings include a dozen ill-parented, shrieking hellspawn, then do what adults did in order to tolerate you as a child, and have a few drinks.2 Otherwise, lighten up, Francis!
What’s most disturbing about this “holiday stress” narrative isn’t the emotional fragility it reveals, but the emotional fragility it may be inspiring. I very much doubt that most people organically cultivate severe angst or dread at the prospect of family get-togethers. For example, note the comparative lack of “survival” tropes around July Fourth, Easter, birthday parties, or any of the other occasions on which families typically gather. But the constant drumbeat that the holiday season is an intensely taxing time of year that one must liberally treat with “self care” in order to escape psychologically intact primes people to be neurotic.3 It’s a wild exaggeration of the experiences of a small minority of society that effectively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for many others.
This holiday season, instead of groaning miserably at the thought of spending time with old people, let’s adopt some of their generation’s resilience. Instead of catastrophizing our non-issue first-world problems, let’s spare a moment to look through history, or simply around the world, and give thanks for how unprecedentedly good we have it. Instead of inventing or hallucinating struggles that aren’t there, let’s have the gumption to shrug off life’s minor inconveniences and the self-respect to simply enjoy the ride.
See also: “The Ingrate’s Prayer”
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And before you complain about inflation, consider this: In the 6th century, salt was traded ounce-for-ounce for gold. People once went to war over salt and spices that anyone today can buy for a few bucks. Sugar cost $0.48 per five pounds in 1950. That’s $1.31 per pound in 2024 dollars. I searched “sugar” on Amazon.com and the top result was a four pound bag for $3.94, or about $0.99 per pound. I won’t bore you with the historical pricing of every food commodity; suffice it to say that regardless of any recent fluctuations, the zoomed-out view shows that we’re all eating better than kings for pennies on the dollar.
As it happens, I was an angelic child in whose company all were universally delighted to be, but we can’t all be so perfect.
While we’re on the subject, let’s set the record straight on something else. Partaking in every form of gastronomic indulgence is not “self care” any more than smashing your kneecap with a ball-peen hammer is physical therapy. Consuming junk food is an age-old coping mechanism, but it doesn’t improve mental health. Poor diet is not only associated with poor mental health, research suggests that it may also actively contribute to it.
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