The holiday affect

(@jontyson)

We are over halfway to Christmas. Every year, I meet more people who bristle over the tinsel and twinkling lights. Many assume as an American that I am evangelical about Christmas. While I don’t put up the decorations the day after Thanksgiving (which is the last Thursday in November!), I enjoy the yuletide and I am learning to take a broader view to what this time of year brings up for people. Christmas is loaded.

Existential suffering

Some of us have received bad news and are in the ICU for the holidays attending to a loved one; some are trying to hold their complex clients with substance abuse to stay alive when they revolt at Christmas. Some of us lost someone to this world recently perhaps violently or arbitrarily; some of us are pretending to play happy families for the kids in the midst of a divorce; some of us are alone and isolated. And the collective holds the pain of world suffering everywhere in those places that we see and hear of and those places where no light seems to get in. Amidst personal and collective pain, a lot of us can feel resistance to the pressure to keep up with the Christmas spirit. It is as if the light and joy bring us in sharp contrast with the darkness enshrouding our lives and the precarious times we live in.

The holiday affect

There can be a dissonance between what is expected of us - to be JOLLY and LIGHT versus what we are actually feeling (dread, annoyance, fear, grief, overwhelm….). This gap between feeling and expectation can create what Sarah Ahmed called the ‘alien affect’ .  When we don’t fulfil the collective’s expectations to meet the moment - ie to be happy, then our real feelings are rejected as inappropriate.  The bride who is about to be married off and is deeply sad. The child who is whining that their birthday cake is too sweet. When we fail to meet these expected moments with the right affect, we can feel wrong or bad and we may cause the mood to drop a note. Over time, these undesirable feelings split off into the shadow and can grow brittle over time. 

Memories of Christmas past

If you are averse to Christmas, it is likely worth asking ourselves, what is our implicit memory of Christmas growing up? Do we remember it fondly? Was it consistent in its rituals and traditions? What was the felt sense anticipating it as a child? For many people, this is where the resistance  remains. Holidays with fighting parents. Holidays where the adults who are boozing become lairy.  Holidays where mom had to take a work shift and wasn’t there. This is how we may carry a kind of hollowing of the holidays over into adult life. We may tell ourselves, Christmas is a children’s holiday. Or for religious worshippers. Or capitalism. Whatever reason we tell ourselves, the work is trying to repair those earlier memories into how you would like to cultivate closeness and connection and love with your family and community in your adult life. And this may be easier in adulthood with your chosen or ‘logical family’. 

The family feast

It is no accident that the symbolism of such abundance of gifts and foodstuffs and plonk can give us the impression of a kind of richness and satiation.  We’ve made it! We have arrived to wholeness and I can have it all!  It’s oral ecstasy (for Freud enthusiasts). There we are shoulder to shoulder with family indulging in a kind of limitless consumption until we hurt. The experience creates a kind of fantasy that we are also emotionally close and understood. And yet, like so many years before, the family regresses into old tensions and habits of interacting that can cause us to feel disjointed, agitated or to regress.

This rupture of the fantasy can be too painful to stomach. So we continue on in our traditions and close off parts of our identity to get by. Or, we revert into adolescence, complaining and withdrawing or unconsciously creating arguments. It could be an auntie who is pushing you about your lovely ex- or a rellie driling you for why you don’t get a certain kind of job, an uncle that belittles you for how big you have grown, to the more guaranteed fight that will ensue over political topics of our day to choose from. The experience leaves us feeling deprived of the closest kind of contact we should have received and wanted as a kid. These family gatherings serve as a phantom - a euphoria merely within reach but not there leaving a kind of lingering sadness that psychoanalysts in academia have called the ‘holiday syndrome’. And we repeat, to recreate the painful fantasy of something we may have been lucky enough to once have had in infancy or never had at all - an endless and unconditional love.

These occasions call forth the ability to both moderate our boundless consumption of earthly material objects, and importantly, of how much we can want. We need not be dependent on trying to meet those unmet needs from the source. Or, recognise that we choose to maintain the fantasy albeit with sobriety and deep self compassion.