How to be alone on Christmas.
By: Alexis Tarver
Tags: Northern Ireland, Holidays, Christmas, Loneliness, Belfast

Cathedral Quarter, Belfast, December 2019

I’m lucky that, this year, I will be around the small bubble of people I’ve been living with while I daydrink and watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. I’m cognizant of the fact that this is not true for a signifcant number of people and, as I’ve been talking with various friends about their single-living holiday plans, I’ve also been reminiscing about the one time I was without family on Christmas.

I had never spent a Christmas without family and, if I’m being honest, I didn’t think in late December of last year that I would have any problem with that. Prior to that day, I had envisioned myself wrapped up in my studio apartment, overlooking a cold, icy and empty Belfast street, sipping my favorite cuppa — an Irish breakfast tea. Perhaps I’d stream a movie or two, call some folks back in the States, eat a self-made charcuterie curated at my local Tesco’s. I’m fancy. I know.

There are a great many aspects of growing older that make holidays…a chore. I had been so used to the theatrical endeavor of traveling home for the holidays. I had moved away from home for college and had continued living my post-grad life there as well, so I was used to sojourning home for what always ended up being quite the holiday adventure (what I’m alluding to here is that it’s no coindence that the Christmas Vacation Griswold family has always reminded me of my own and held a special place in my heart).

Traveling home for the holidays always included a schedule of pre-roadtrip tasks: the packing, the apartment cleaning, the shoving a cat into a crate and then that crate into a car, the stop off at a Valvoline so that I could have a mechanic tell me that “No, there is nothing wrong with your tires” (a tradition I started after I blew a tire on the interstate a few Christmases back).

Once I arrived, I would be greeted at the door by the family dog (my biggest fan because I am and always have been a huge advocate for long walks) and my siblings who are nine years younger than me and might as well be surrogate children. The first two days are magical. I can sleep in. I can venture to old haunts (a favorite local coffeeshop). I can catch up with friends who are also back engaging in the same travel ritual as I am. Around day three or so, though, I begin to remember why I enjoyed leaving in the first place.

Privacy goes out the window. You want to nap? Someone is going to ask why and for how long. There is the constant stream of conservative media on the family television, bookended only by nearly identical Hallmark Christmas movies. There is far too much drinking that occurs at the tail end, usually spurred on by two things: the introduction of politics into family discussion and the clear reality that you won’t be able to take the beer with you, so you might as well drink it there.

All logic (and lived experience) had conditioned me to think that December 25, 2019 would be a great many things it usually wasn’t: quiet, calm, and devoid of passive aggressive politics or weird questions about my love life. Last Christmas was all of those things. But it was also a little lonely. I caught myself missing the warmth that occurs in a dimly lit space where a group of people who love each other decide to be quiet together. For all of the boisterous conversation, the third degree questioning about my career, or the unending Hallmark marathon, holidays are also the time when I’m fully and physically surrounded by familial love. It’s the only time, barring weddings and funerals, when I feel it. Weddings are far too stressful to me, typically, and funerals far too sad. Both of those occassions usually require uncomfortable shoes to be worn. Christmas, as a time for gathering, never had the accompanying stress and commotion of nuptials or the melancholy of a death. And I was always free to wear elastic pants without judgment.