How Will You Spend Your Holidays Essay

[Darth Gupta]

Iimagine readers who are Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek would have a similar reaction; as would readers who are Latino, Indian and Chinese. Indeed, I'd be very curious to hear Sarah Haider's perspective.

I can't help but wonder if your disconnection from extended family has an ethno-cultural component. (If I recall correctly, you described your family as vaguely Germanic, with almost no connection to an old country and it's folkways.)

I know what I\u2019m about to say sounds insane and, to a vast majority of you, will come across as almost alarmingly sad, but trust me on this: the holiday season makes me feel lucky not to have much family. Thanksgiving Day is among my favorite occasions for staying home by myself and eating a normal meal as if it were any other Thursday. It feels like being given the ultimate hall pass. Actually, it\u2019s even better than that. It feels like getting away with a victimless yet slightly wicked crime.

First, I did not spend this Thanksgiving alone. I went to the home of a friend who prepared a feast for dozens of guests. It was a lovely and delicious time, perfect in its own way. Let the record show that I am in fact an extremely social person. It\u2019s not like I sit out Thanksgiving every year. I\u2019d say I sit it out every other year.

Second, the number of blood relatives I have is not zero. I have a brother, who I see somewhat regularly (though not generally on Thanksgiving). I have a smattering of cousins, who I see almost never. More significantly, I have a handful of friends with whom I am close enough to consider them family. But I have neither children of my own nor any nieces or nephews. My parents have both passed away, as have all of their siblings. Even if those aunts and uncles weren\u2019t deceased, it wouldn\u2019t matter much because my brother and I grew up barely knowing them and, as a result, would be hard-pressed to have recognized them on the street at any given point in our childhoods, much less adulthoods.

Let me also make this clear: none of this estrangement was the result of any abuse, neglect, or malfeasance. For reasons I\u2019ll never fully understand, my parents, especially my mother, wanted little if anything to do with their families of origin, especially once they had their own kids. (If you\u2019re interested in my attempts to untangle my mother\u2019s psychology, you can read the first essay of this book.) But the technicalities of my family dynamic are not the point of what I am saying to you right now. I only mean that it\u2019s not like I\u2019m an orphan or some kind of casualty of a massively toxic upbringing. It\u2019s more like I\u2019m a piece of ice that\u2019s broken off a slightly larger piece of ice that was floating alone in the sea.

I\u2019m not sure what it says about me that my reaction to this upbringing was to avoid making a family of my own. I can see someone just as easily having the opposite reaction. If you grew up as one of four passengers on an ice floe to nowhere, I can imagine wanting to create a huge family, if for no other reason than to build a bridge back to the shore. But I went the other direction (as did my brother, though I won\u2019t speak to his motivation), and not only do my circumstances elicit no regret, they occasionally induce a perverse euphoria. I know JOMO, or \u201Cjoy of missing out,\u201D is all the rage these days, but I was into it before it was cool. In fact, if JOMO were a sport I\u2019d be a world-class endurance athlete.

Admittedly, I have genetics to thank, since the other members of my frozen island family were or are largely the same way. But maybe there\u2019s a mystical element somewhere in the mix, too. Not infrequently, while sitting alone with my thoughts, a feeling of peace will descend upon me that I can only describe as an almost divine awareness of the great luck of my own solitude. That is not to say the solitude itself is lucky (though maybe it is) but that having the ability to experience it as such is a stupendous stroke of fortune. Never is this luck more deeply felt than the Thanksgivings I spend alone.

In New York City, where I still keep a foothold despite keeping the other foot three time zones away, Thanksgiving Day swirls through the streets like the last of the leaves. I take special pleasure in walking through my neighborhood in the late afternoon of that day, when dinner guests carrying covered dishes begin emerging from subway stations and stepping out of Ubers. In the span of just a few blocks, you can witness a thousand celebrations in the making, each with its own set of Gordian family ties and unmeetable expectations. I see the same types time and again: the young man carrying supermarket flowers purchased en route; the gray-haired couple just in from the suburbs, bickering about where it\u2019s safe to park the car; the harried families whose small children drop their stuffed toys on the sidewalk as their parents pull them along.

There\u2019s a particular kind of young couple I see every year. They stand in building entries and scrunch their faces as they study the buzzer directory. They carry Mylar-wrapped bottles of wine and a dessert. One of them is slightly overdressed, as if nervous to impress. The other is looking at his phone. I\u2019ve seen a dozen versions of this couple\u2014they could be a same-sex couple or an opposite-sex couple; it doesn\u2019t matter\u2014and what I think to myself every time is that this is probably their first Thanksgiving together. I\u2019ve imagined that one of them is meeting the other\u2019s friends or family for the first time, and it is perhaps too early in their relationship for this kind of thing but what else can they do? I imagine they are staring straight into the barrel of the holidays and wondering whether they should be with this person at all. Or maybe they\u2019re already wondering how they\u2019ll ever live without this person.

I am cautiously happy for this couple. I am also profoundly happy not to be them. This is also what I feel about family life. I celebrate it in others, but personally I\u2019m fine taking a pass. I recognize that this is a pretty bleak psychological map I\u2019m laying out here. I\u2019ll be the first to admit that it\u2019s a fundamentally fucked-up way to see yourself in relation to the world. But for whatever reason, this is the map upon which I\u2019ve been able to chart a course for the most honest and valuable version of myself.

I\u2019ve been wanting to write about this subject for a a long time, but I\u2019ve always talked myself out if. For all my willingness to \u201Cconfront\u201D readers with \u201Cchallenging\u201D ideas, extolling the virtues of family-free living and solitary holidays always seemed like a bridge too far. I also know I\u2019m practically begging for accusations of protesting too much. If she were really so happy not to have a family, she wouldn\u2019t have to write 1,300 words telling us about it.

But I\u2019m writing about it now because I know I\u2019m not the only one who feels this way. I may be one of the few who admits as much, but believe me when I say that there are countless people out there who treasure their autonomy in ways they feel are practically illegal to say out loud. I know this because they tell me. And the reason they tell me is because I\u2019m willing to tell you.

On a Thanksgiving night about five years ago, I took my dog Phoebe out for her pre-bedtime walk around 10 p.m. We\u2019d spent the day alone together, which chokes me up a little now to think about, since I would have to put her down a few years later (not long after my father died, no less). Rounding the corner, I saw a man standing on the sidewalk near the one building in our little enclave that has a doorman and might therefore count as \u201Cfancy.\u201D He looked to be in his 40s and was wearing an expensive-looking overcoat and nice leather shoes. He was vomiting into the bushes.

I turned my head out of respect, which I guess is another way of saying I hid my eyes out of embarrassment. I could only guess he was throwing up after drinking too much pinot noir in some well-appointed Beaux-Arts apartment. I imagined him self-medicating his way through the evening as everyone talked about what shows they were watching on Netflix. I wondered how he was going to get home. Would he throw up in a taxi? Would he pass out on the subway? I imagined how awful he was going to feel in the morning, how much he was going to wish he\u2019d stayed home and done nothing. Of course, it\u2019s possible I\u2019d read the situation all wrong\u2014 maybe he had food poisoning or cancer\u2014but I\u2019m pretty sure I was right.

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In Toronto, Christmas Present is being marked by the arrival of an overabundance of inflated holiday deities. Pumped up Santa Clauses, reindeer, and snowmen are sprouting up like dandelions in the spring. Accompanied by a surfeit of multicoloured lights on every edifice, shrub, and sapling. A winter wonderland of lights and holiday idols to chase away the COVID blues. If bright lights could kill the virus, it would be eradicated by the holiday radiances.

Our gatherings will be smaller this year and annual holiday parties voided or worse, replaced by Zoom or Teams events. Perhaps, Keith was talking about video events and not his alcohol consumption. Another thing that will likely be shrinking this year is the size of our turkeys. In our house, I would be happy if it shrank to nothing. I think turkey should be treated like haggis, consumed once a year and only by people who believe their heritage obligates them to do so.

Before department stores began to appear in the late nineteenth century, Christmas was considered a time to pause and spend time with friends and family. Small gifts were exchanged, but certainly, no one was going into debt to meet their gift onuses.

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