A Love Note for Those Doing Christmas Alone

This is a love note for a very specific group of women in my community: the ones doing Christmas alone.

This is my sixth Christmas as a single parent. I have a big family and it has only grown since that first solo Christmas in 2020. And let me be clear up front: I love Christmas. I love my big fam. I love my big kids. I love this time of year. I love traditions and big dinners. I love giving gifts and making magic. So this is coming from someone who is INTO IT ALL.

This time of year, I feel the lack of a spouse most acutely. In the best of times, Christmas for our family was a two-man job, and even then, we both worked our little fingers to the bone to get it all decorated, hung, shopped, bought, wrapped, assigned, managed, cooked, sorted, and finished. December meant a million decisions a day and a thousand moving parts. The division of labor was an absolute requirement to get it all done. Just my half of the work for two and half decades was fully overwhelming.

And now I do all of it by myself. A bunch of you do too. It’s all on you.

You are keeping the traditions going, the house decorated. You are doing all the shopping, all the managing. You are in charge of everyone’s everything. There is no one to hand anything off to. No one to take half. No one to even take a decision off your plate. It is actually hard to describe how lonely and hard this can be.

So I see you. I know you are working so very hard. I know how much you love your family and want to make this season beautiful for them. I understand the fatigue.

I was having lunch with my friend Lindsey this week, and we were going to share a pastry, and I literally said: “Can you please just pick it? I can’t make a single other decision today.”

You are doing an outstanding job. Just a reminder that you don’t have to create some impossible Christmas experience. Do what makes sense, what you can manage and afford and want, and everything else can go. My Christmas gets a little smaller every year. My Christmas-loving friends are all adding, and I am subtracting. Don’t be too proud to ask for help; I called my mom two of the last five years to help me wrap presents. I changed a complicated holiday menu to soup. Do Christmas however you want to, because you are just one person and you love your family, and that is what lasts.

I sure love you, Solo Christmas Merry-Makers. I am proud of you. I wish you could lay your head in my lap so I could play with your hair and feed you snacks. You got this. You show up and you show up and you show up, and nothing matters more.