There is a version of Christmas we are sold – glossy, coordinated, loud with joy and certainty, and then there is the Christmas many of us actually live: quieter, more complicated, sometimes tender, sometimes heavy, often unfinished. I learned this the hard way.

 

After my divorce over a decade and a half ago, Christmas became something I struggled with silently, not out of bitterness or resistance, but because I loved my children too much to offer them anything less than perfect, and perfection suddenly felt impossible. The season arrived carrying questions I wasn’t ready to answer. Could I give them enough? Was my home enough? Was I enough?

 

For a few years, resetting meant accepting that I couldn’t match what I imagined other children were getting. I felt guilty about that; guilty that my family didn’t look whole; guilty that there was an empty space where a parent should have been; guilty that putting up a Christmas tree felt less like joy and more like a task I had to brace myself for. It still does, if I’m honest, though now, for very different reasons.

Christmas has a way of magnifying what is missing. The empty chair does not always belong to someone who has died. Sometimes it belongs to a marriage that ended or a child who has grown and moved on, or even a version of yourself that no longer exists. And each year, when the season returns, it asks, ‘How are you going to hold that absence this time?’

What made it harder, in the beginning, was the performance of it all – the matching pyjamas (which I hated with a passion), expectation that joy should look a certain way, the unspoken pressure of the end-of-year stock take: Did you do enough? Are you where you should be? Did you deliver your best life?

 

It took me a few Christmases to realise that this pressure wasn’t coming from the season itself. This pressure was coming from the story I thought I had to uphold.

Life will happen. Seasons will end. There will always be another empty chair. That part is unavoidable. What is within our control is how we interpret Christmas, and how bravely we allow that interpretation to change.

So here goes: I don’t love the performance of Christmas, but I love the love. Perhaps that’s because love is the only thing that truly matches the origin of the season itself. Stripped of spectacle, stripped of excess, Christmas began as the birth of love — not perfection, not abundance, not applause, just love arriving quietly into a fragile world. When I remember that, the season makes sense again. Christmas becomes less about how it looks and more about how it feels.

 

I don’t particularly enjoy Christmas carols, but I love firesides, long conversations, and terrible Christmas cracker jokes. I may or may not put up a tree, and if it goes up, it usually means I had help. That’s not resentment; it’s honesty. I am lazy in many areas of life (except running, boxing, and strength training).

I try now to make Christmas less financial and more intentional. I may or may not give a gift,  but you will feel my presence. You will feel the warmth. My love will envelope you, even if it doesn’t come wrapped.

It has taken me almost sixteen years to arrive here. Before that, my participation in Christmas felt performatory — going along with the flow because that’s what was expected. Now, I try to make it honest. I make time for who I love. I honour who I’ve lost, including parts of myself, and I allow myself to be curious about what the next Christmas might mean.

This is the untold truth: Christmas doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. It doesn’t have to be loud to be full. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s to be real.

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So when I say ‘Merry Christmas’ now, I mean it differently. I mean it as a wish for warmth over wealth, presence over performance, love over illusion. I don’t mind the matching pyjamas anymore. I still think they can look extra, but I could be persuaded, and maybe that’s the quiet invitation of this season — not to perform joy, but to practice truth; not to recreate what once was, but to honour what is; not to chase perfection, but to choose love, again and again, in whatever form it arrives.

 

Because Christmas isn’t always merry, but if it holds love — real, intentional, human love, then it is already holy enough.

 

See you next week.

 

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