Why I’m grateful I lost my festive spirit this year.
By: Holly Berry
Tags: Christmas, 2020, Covid 19, Family, Gratitude

(Credit: GPOINTSTUDIO, Getty Images)

It goes without saying that this year was a year unlike any other. Lockdowns, isolations, fear, anxiety, and illness all played central parts in sculpting the way we will remember 2020 for the rest of our lives. That’s why I, like countless others, struggled to find my Christmas spirit- but I’m grateful for it. Here’s why.

Normally, my family, and I’m sure this goes for the majority of people, rarely all find time to be together. Work, school, timetables, meeting up with friends, going out at night, and many other things mean that we would never find time for the four of us to eat dinner together. Things got so bad that my parents decided to take the dining table and chairs to the local tip and turn the dining room into a second living room so we could relax while someone else was watching a film in another room. Pre-covid, we would eat meals alone or in pairs at the two-seater bar. Between March and September, we had nothing to do but start to share similar eating schedules; instead of eating when we came home from work/school at varying times of the afternoon or evening, we automatically began to cook dinner at the same time. We still don’t have a dining table, but the patio table from the garden has become a staple piece of indoor furniture that we can sit around. For seven months, the four of us would eat at least one meal a day together (getting my younger brother out of bed before midday is a challenge no mortal man could accomplish, so we very quickly gave up on eating breakfast together), and this became our new normal. I know that “new normal” has been a phrase used so often this year that it’s essentially lost all meaning, but doing my university work alone up in my room and knowing that I would be having a real face-to-face connection with my family in the evening helped keep me motivated. Part of my Christmas excitement each year is the anticipation of eating a home-cooked dinner with my immediate family, normally for the first time since the Christmas before. This year, I’ve become so accustomed to eating dinner with my family, telling them all the small things I accomplished or found interesting that day, and hearing about the small things from their lives, that the momentous occasion of a ‘proper family dinner’ has become normal. It’s no longer something rare that I need to feel excited about- isolation has brought us all closer together as a family, and now we value our time spent together as work and school slowly returns to pre-covid normal.

Another reason I’m grateful not to feel festive is that it shows an acknowledgment that things are still very much abnormal. It’s ordinary to get excited about Christmas and think of the childlike wonder I used to feel for it when I was younger, but this year has been extraordinary. Of course Christmas films and Mariah Carey and Whamageddon have made the anxiety from this year a little less all-consuming- and I’ve enjoyed numerous rewatches of Love Actually and National Lampoon’s: Christmas Vacation as much as the next person- but Covid and tier 4 restrictions have been a sobering reminder that we aren’t out of the woods yet. I had all of my presents bought and wrapped by the start of December in case all of the shops had to close, and our Christmas dinner shopping was finished far earlier than usual in anticipation of stricter lockdown rules. I still had a wonderful time watching my parents open the presents my brother and I had picked for them, and the Christmas dinner was still my favourite dinner of the year: my lack of festive spirit simply means that there was a part of my brain reminding me to be grateful for every second of it, now knowing how easily normality can change. I still sang the lyrics to Step Into Christmas obnoxiously loudly and out of tune, but at the same time I knew how precious it was that the four of us were here to be yelling the words with no attempt to harmonise. If this year has taught me anything, it is that every moment of happiness and every moment shared with our loved ones truly is a blessing that is unparalleled by anything else.

To summarise why I’m not bothered that I wasn’t feeling festive this year: it’s because I was so enormously, immensely grateful that I was here today with my family that my excitement could never hope to outweigh the gratitude. Every smile from behind opened presents, or the sound of laughter from cheesy Christmas cracker jokes was something I wasn’t certain at the start of Covid that I would be blessed enough to experience again, but I’m so, so lucky that I did.