I Won’t Be Home for Christmas

And understanding why doesn't make it hurt any less

Small glass snowman with red scarf and santa hat surrounded by cotton balls | A Practical Wedding

This Christmas will be the first time I’m not going home for the holidays. Last year’s Christmas festivities culminated in me sulking the entire drive from Florida to Mississippi because I was still mad at my new husband for making a comment overheard by my mother right before Christmas dinner about how we wouldn’t be there next year. We hadn’t talked about where we’d be yet, but logical me can understand the assumption that, yes, barring any extenuating circumstances, if we spent Christmas this year with my family, odds are we’d probably be spending next Christmas with his.

Too bad logical me didn’t show up for Christmas dinner.

I spent the entirety of dinner fuming at him on the inside because I found my mom crying right before we sat down to eat, and when I found out about his comment that set the crying off, we whisper fought in the dining room right before we had to go sit down with the whole group in the living room to eat. Whisper fights, it turns out, don’t tend to solve anything. They kind of just make things worse.

When we got in the car the next day to leave to spend the next week with his family, I was sad to go. We moved to Boston right after our wedding, a whole thirty-some-odd hours from either of our hometowns, and Christmas is really the only time of year we get to go home right now. I hadn’t seen my family since the wedding, and I wasn’t ready to leave. And, true to fashion, rather than try to verbalize my feelings, I let them build for an entire twelve hour car ride, after which there was some very dignified shouting and sobbing and door-slamming when he asked what was wrong and I told him just how much I hated being here, with his family.

It wasn’t my finest moment. It probably wasn’t either of ours.

Afterward, we talked, not shouted, like actual adults this time, and it probably doesn’t take much of a psychology background to figure out it wasn’t at all a matter of me not wanting to be in his hometown with his family; it was that I’ve really missed my own family the past year and was sad about leaving them knowing we probably wouldn’t be back for another year.

We hugged, made up, and promised to be more communicative about our emotions during the holidays in the future.

But I’m already dreading this coming holiday season.

His family doesn’t celebrate Christmas the same way mine does. As far as I can tell from the outside, Christmas just isn’t quite as big a deal for them. He is the youngest of his family. I am the oldest. So, while his family has been navigating the process of splitting Christmas between multiple families for years, mine is going through it for the first time this year. His older sisters already have kids and houses of their own, so for his family, Christmas is a few hours of just the immediate family gathered at one house on Christmas day, after which everyone goes their own separate ways. My younger sisters and I travel in from out of state for Christmas, so we all still stay at my parents’ house for the entire trip. Christmas involves spending the entire day together, with plenty of extended family coming over for a big dinner. Neither way is better, just different.

Or, so says it’s-still-only-October-and-I’m-still-capable-of-being-rational-about-this me. What I’m worried about is that Christmastime me might lose that ability to be rational at any point and devolve into an emotional mess. And God, if it wasn’t bad enough that last Christmas I told my poor husband I hated being with his family, when he had just given up spending Christmas with his family for the first time to spend it with mine, what if I make his family feel like that this year? What if I can’t hide how sad I am about not being with my own family and I make them feel like I don’t want to be there, with them?

For now, I’m just trying to allow myself to mourn the fact that I won’t be with my own family for Christmas this year, on my own time. I’m trying to come to terms with it ahead of time, to tell myself that it’s okay to be sad, to tell myself that my own family will manage without me, and I’m trying to do all of that before Christmas gets here instead of letting all those emotions build to a breaking point the day of. I’m trying to think about ways to take care of myself this holiday season, and I’m trying to think about what traditions I can ask my husband to participate in with me on and around Christmas so that I don’t feel that I don’t have any control over how we experience our own holidays, regardless of whose family we’re with. I’m trying to get up the courage to call my mom and talk through the logistics of how we’ll do Christmas this year—what traditions they’ll do without me there and which ones we’ll wait on. And I’m trying to see spending Christmas with his family as a chance to get to know them better and spend time with them without feeling like doing that means I love my own family any less.

So many things about marriage have felt easy for me. This, though, feels really hard. For now, even if I’d rather just pout (because let’s face it, isn’t that always the easier option?), I’m promising myself that I will be a big girl and deal with my feelings as they come.

I’m promising myself that I will have a Merry Christmas, even if I won’t be home for it this year.

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