#holidays while grieving

I didn't realize the holiday season would hit this hard.

For the entire time I have been alive, Decembers were special for my family: my brother, dad and I celebrate our birthdays this month, my parents got married in December and of course, there are festivities that come with celebrating Christmas. We usually had five major dinners: my dad, my brother, and my birthday dinner, my parents' anniversary dinner, and then the midnight meal on the 24th.

In previous years, my family prepared for celebration season starting in November: my mom and I would start plotting our meals, brainstorming on the sequencing of dinners to make sure that there was enough variety in the food that we were eating so we wouldn't be having, like, roasted ham for all five of our dinners. It was exciting (though slightly stressful) trying to figure out what to eat when: did we truly want to order a lechon when it's a. unhealthy and b. it's so big? Did we want to try our luck with all you can eat sushi? How about fried lobster?

Then there came the question of presents.

My dad had a weird hang-up about presents, seeing these as evidence of how much we loved him. This weirdness stems from the fact that growing up, he felt that his birthday was...well, something his family just forgot. As the third son in a family of five, my dad always felt that he was in the background, with major milestones such as his birthday not even meriting much celebration. In fact, my mom would call my dad's family while my dad was still asleep to remind them to call him, and to wish him happy birthday, something that my uncle still "forgot" to do despite my mom's reminders.

There was a lot of trauma there, which I understand as explaining why my dad was so exacting about the gifts we gave, trying to see whether our gifts were given out of true love for him or whether we were doing so in a rote manner. Although I was frustrated because this meant it was so hard to get my dad a good gift - Beatles paraphernalia and biographies were inevitably deemed to be written by hacks, fancy shirts from fancy stores were a waste of money, books by authors that I thought my dad would like were not as good as writers who my dad considdered the masters - I realized, in my thirties and after my own stint in therapy, that my dad's tendency to criticize gifts were his trauma response.

Yet, later in life, he stopped being critical and grew to appreciate all of the gifts that his grandchildren gave, which he saw as being given out of genuine love. I remember a previous birthday when my then 4 year old showed the dance that she had prepared for her beloved nono. The dance went on...and on...and on...and on. I swear, it was a 15 minute dance recital, with SP clad in a pale green tinker bell costume and while I was getting antsy and started looking at the clock, my dad sat riveted, clapping his hands and saying that this was the best birthday gift EVER. So December became easier and less fraught when his grandchildren came.

(Pictured: here are my parents in December 2020, celebrating their anniversary with take-out from a now closed Chinese restaurant that served lobster)