Like Regular Christmas, But Actually Fun: Why Yule Love the Solo Christmas LOL Sorry
Please Murder Me For This Pun Tysm!
Ironically—or whatever the word is for the thing that’s not actually irony but that we and especially Alanis Morissette think of as irony—this year, of all years, the one where many of us are forced to spend Christmas alone, I am spending Christmas with other human persons for the first time in ages. Which is delightful! Also weird!
Due to, you know, the apocalypse and like *gestures at everything* I am living in St. Louis for a spell with what my ersatz-matriarch calls “Family of Choice™”—the alternate, non-genetic family that persons choose when their actual family are unwelcoming or dead or insufferable assholes or whatever. So I’m actually having a sort of normal Christmas for the first time in like more than a decade on account of much of my family is ~*insane*~, and it is very wonderful! There’s a tree! And lights! And children playing a daily game of hide-and-seek with an elf! I am contributing an extremely elegant French gratin that contains 15 American dollars worth of something called ~*artisanal cave-aged Gruyère*~ to Friday’s Christmas dinner AND I purchased actual Christmas gifts for other actual living persons who will sit across from me on a sofa Friday morning and open them in front of my actual face!!! I haven’t done any of this shit since the Bush Administration!
And the truly bizarre part is that everyone in this Saint Louis house participating in this Saint Louis Christmas ~*likes each other*~, which lolololol what kind of scam are these people running?! As you’ll soon read below, I don’t trust a happy family. I don’t trust a happy family! They are all up to something! People who share DNA are not supposed to enjoy each other’s company, it’s not natural. But this one is a notable exception to the rule. They’re like actual functioning persons who’ve like ~*proactively elected*~ to go to therapy instead of winding up there after devolving for years and then having a psychotic break in a Panera Bread like someone I know who is me! It’s a dream! Which is why I picked them out of the catalog of substitute families you are automatically sent at the onset of pubescence when you are a homosexual born to people with ~*deeply held religious beliefs*~
Anyway, lest I seem to be twisting the knife here, I recognize that what for me is a charming diversion from the norm is many people’s yearly status quo, and that many of you are facing a solo Christmas maybe for the first time ever due to Biblical plagues of super-spreading “freedom lovers” and the pestilence that is their legacy. And I bet that is kind of hard! I mean, I’ve been flying solo for Christmas since 2007 and my mom and I don’t speak but nevertheless I got so nostalgic for the dulcet sounds of her bellowing “This is SUPPOSED to be FUN” while ragehurling cookie cutters and measuring spoons into the kitchen sink with a high-drama clatter and then growling “I’m fine Merry Christmas” like a rabid dingo when you ask her if she’s okay that I almost made a batch of her Christmas cookies this week just to capture that old unhinged magic! So I can only imagine how you’re feeling if you actually like your family.
And so, as a person uniquely qualified to speak to the nuances of a Solo Christmas, I thought I would jump into these Substack pages and share a thing I wrote a few years ago extolling the virtues of such. Perhaps it will help lighten your load!
Now I hear you saying, “Shut up and let me be sad I miss my family Christmas!” but here is my counterpoint: LOL bitch no you don’t! Because be real, Christmas is almost always ass! Whereas Solo Christmas low-key rules.
Herewith, a lightly edited version of my unhinged 2017 masterpiece read by fives of people, “In Praise of the Solo Christmas,” also available in fine stores everywhere by which I medium Medium dot com and my dumb blog I forget I have until Wordpress sends the yearly payment demand for my domain name thank you!
In Praise of the Solo Christmas
Much like how Halloween is for children and hot people, Christmas is for children and people in love. Some of us are part of families that like “get along” and like each other or something (which LOLOLOL that is a myth like the moon landing, I see you), but the rest of us are just muddling through, and for a lot of us that means flying solo. If you’re one of them, this essay is for you!
In my adult life, I’ve spent more Christmases alone than not — and there have been some real knees to the nuts among them! Like Christmas 2009, when not only were relations with family fraying, but I was unemployed, uninsured, mentally unstable and sick with bronchitis. It was a day I mostly spent coughing and crying and coughcrying. I’d thought the nadir had arrived when a friend-with-benefits texted to see if I wanted some Christmas peen — nothing makes you feel the warmth of the season like unsolicited booty calls! — but then I burst into tears and word-vomited a text three screens long to this person I barely knew about how I couldn’t bang because I couldn’t breathe and had been sick for a month and was afraid I was going to die and he was like, “Yoooooo srsly r u ok I kno we just fk n shit but if u need cough syrup or something lmk it’s cool.” And then he signed it “mary xmas” and I briefly considered putting my head in the oven. Things couldn’t possibly get worse!
But then I locked myself out of my apartment when I went to retrieve my Christmas dinner pizza, so I spent the rest of that bleak Christmas coughing and shivering in the stairwell like a Dickensian street urchin dying of consumption, waiting for the only locksmith in New York I could get on the phone to come pry my door open for the last $500 I had to my name. And the fucking pizza was from fucking Domino’s.
I am just saying, I know from shitty Christmases!
But luckily, in the ensuing years I’ve gradually learned to actually enjoy my Solo Christmases. Or at least not hate them! Cuz seriously? It kind of rules. Now I hear what you’re sobbing: NOOOO I AM MISERABLE I WANT TO BE DEAD UNTIL JANUARY 2. No you don’t. You’re just missing the ~*idea*~ of a perfect Christmas.
Because the fact is that “Hell is other people,” as Camus put it, and they have the power to ruin even the most joyful day of the year.
“Family Christmas”? More like SHAM-ily Christmas Amirite I Have No Idea What This Means But Fuck a Family Christmas For Real
Anecdotal example: One Christmas I spent with my family 436 years ago, all was well, merry and bright even! Dinner was good, presents were good, my sister-in-law’s Dad only had one weird fugue state rambling about Glenn Miller instead of the usual seven, it was fine! Then we went to see The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and my brother and I got into a screamfight in the parking lot of the AMC Desert Ridge 18 because I correctly pointed out that C.S. Lewis was making a symbolic commentary about World War II and he was offended by my attempt to push my liberal agenda onto a “Christian movie” by insinuating World War II into a STORY THAT STARTS WITH AN EVACUATION FROM WORLD WAR II.
The facts are these: Christmas with family is an exercise in navigating other people’s unreasonable and nonsensical bugaboos until you get a moment to sneak off to the bathroom and bite down on a balled-up towel so you don’t scream until your throat bleeds. You are missing nothing.
“Friendsmas”??? More like ENDS-mas as in END MY LIFE PLEASE I Apologize These Puns Are Really Subpar and You and the Infant Christ Both Deserve Better
Then there’s the occasional years when friends stay in town for Christmas. Which is also a minefield! Because here’s the thing: maybe it’s the ipso facto only-childism I was imbued with by dint of not having grown up in the same house as my siblings, but since I stopped spending a week on eggshells with my family each Christmas, I want MY Christmas MY way:
I don’t want to eat the deconstructed Welsh rarebit your idiot boyfriend found in the Ina Garten cookbook because somehow our entire generation reached adulthood without ever being taught how to cook (who are your mothers?!?!). Food is the only thing holding me together from Thanksgiving to New Year’s and I need it to be on lock.
The Eurythmics’ bonkers version of “Winter Wonderland” aside, I don’t want to even hear the opening notes of a Christmas song recorded after the 1970s because they are all trash. I will see you in hell before I listen to whatever a Pentatonic is. Turn it off.
I’d rather navigate the awkward heartbreak of you pitching your latest “multi-level business opportunity” than sink into the soot-black depths of deflation and rage inspired by someone trilling, “Let’s watch Love Actually!” I say this as someone who has entire scenes of Notting Hill memorized and is the debilitatingly depressed homosexual target demographic of this movie: Love Actually is a CW primetime soap opera except more incompetently made and inexplicably containing international A-list talent one of whom wears a fucking beanie to a goddamn wedding, so sign me up for 40 essential oil kits and a packet of weight-loss vitamins to go cuz I’m done. Fa la la leave me alone.
Why would I do any of that when I can just stay home and eat cookies for breakfast while watching Bridget Jones’s Diary in my pajamas and then sneak into three back-to-back Oscar-bait “prestige pictures” nobody wants to see except white liberals and then go home and smoke drugs to Madonna’s “Ray of Light” album? In excelsis deo amirite!
Lovers’ Christmas? More Like SHOVERS Christmas As In SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS Haha This One’s Actually Pretty Good Huh No? Ok
Now, to be fair: Would it be ideal to spend Christmas with a lover, waking up late for morning sex and then making pancakes in the nude before opening a series of presents that are all expertly chosen and perfectly suited and then giggling “You know what I’ve always wanted to do on Christmas is do sex things actually under the Christmas tree LOLJK I COULDN’T POSSIBLY IT’S SUCH A DUMB IDEA FORGET I SAID IT LOLOLOL” but since my lover is the kind of guy who’s not only dumb-sexy and named something like Logan but also witty and game he immediately doffs his pj’s and affixes a discarded stick-on bow to his bush and rolls under the tree and points to his erection and is like “Ho ho ho, hoe” and I purr “O tannenbaum!” like Samantha Jones and then after we do sex I post something truly disgusting on Insta like a picture of him afterglow-sleeping in the tree skirt with the caption “I got everything I wanted #thankssanta” and smile to myself knowing how much my single friends hate my guts?
Yes, of course! But first of all LOLOLOL I will die alone mourned by no one but the dust mites residing in my ear hair and secondly I can only assume sexy romantic Christmases are a lie because I boned down with a lot of dudes of all shapes, colors and sizes in my slutty years and I can count on one hand the ones who were any good at it or had a single, solitary romantic bone in their bodies. If I ever find myself abed with a gay man who actually cares one iota whether or not I even nutted, let alone whether or not I feel ~*emotionally sustained*~ I will have an actual aneurysm. They are not worth the paper they are printed on! So the best I can hope for, romantic Christmaswise, is some queen who will let me control the remote and won’t get offended if I want to return everything he bought me for cash I can spend on something I really want, like gluten-free pizzas.
So if family, potentially friends, and certainly romance are out, what am I supposed to do, sit here and lament till New Year’s?! Which leads us back to Solo Christmases and why they are better than all other options FOR INSTANCE LIKE SUCH AS
A. NO GIFTS.
Now I know what you’re thinking: gifts are fun and I want them please! But let’s be real, how many gifts can you say you’ve gotten that you didn’t have to awkwardly pretend to love while silently praying you burst into flames? If you tell me it’s more than a half-dozen tops over the course of your entire stupid life you need to stop reading this because you are a lie-teller and honesty is extremely important to me? Get out.
But also! YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY ANY GIFTS EITHER. The only thing worse than having to receive gifts you don’t want is running (or clicking) around spending money you don’t have that could be better spent on Grubhubbed falafels and the $2.99 version of your favorite Pornhub clip that doesn’t cut out right before the cumshot. Did you know the average person spends $5,164 on Christmas gifts every year?! That is an insane number and I think you’ll agree in the harsh light of day that it just makes no sense, and not only because it is a completely fake number I made up to prove my point, which I think I’ve done handily.
Anyway fuck gifts. Also!
2. NO PANTS.
I don’t think I need to elaborate on this. You do not have to squeeze your midsection into actual pants at Solo Christmas. If you don’t understand why that is a profound benefit over regular Christmas, take your skinny ass the hell up out of here and go, I don’t know, feel good about your body or whatever the hell it is you people do. The adults who’ve never seen their abdominal musculature are talking.
Speaking of obesity:
iii. YOU CAN EAT (OR DRINK [OR BOTH]) AS MUCH AS YOU WANT
Christmas With Other Persons™ means that you have to share everything, so when your mother makes a withering remark all you can do is dig your fingernails into your flesh and gnaw on the insides of your cheeks until you taste blood because there isn’t enough spinach-dip-in-a-bread-bowl to feed 10 people AND stop you from screaming “WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST ABORT ME YOU FRIGID BITCH.”
But at Solo Christmas™, any feelings that do arise can just be Hot Pocketed to the margins while Hulu’ing The O.C. with your nuts in your hand (or boobs or labia majora or Ken Doll void or whatever, I want to be inclusive). Welcome to the Solo Christmas, bitch.
And if you have a particularly hard time with the episode where Mischa Barton dies:
Four. YOU CAN OPENLY WEEP AT THINGS IF THE NEED ARISES
Today I watched Miracle on 34th Street and when they got to the part where Natalie Wood, may she rest, finally gets her house with a swing in the backyard and her momz finally falls in love with the presumptuous homosexual across the hall, I started sobbing because like Natalie Wood, may she rest, I am also the product of a broken home and was raised by a disillusioned single mother whose wounds made her forget how to dream and this summer I went to see my childhood home and the new owners had ripped up all the gardens she tended so meticulously and replaced them with mulch and if she knew that she would be so hurt and isn’t that just how it goes ultimately nothing but a hair’s breadth separates all the beauty and all the death in the world and we are every one of us just tight-roping our way along that line hoping the moment we finally fall doesn’t come until we’re old and gray and our life hopefully had enough time to mean something to someone but more than likely it won’t have or at least not as much as we wish and there’s nothing we can do about that but surrender to the endless expanse of time and THIS is what it is to be human THIS is what it is to be alive and then the presumptuous homosexual kisses the mom and you know that he and she and Natalie Wood, may she rest, will finally be a family and then it turns out Santa Claus is real and the movie ends.
And if I’d not been alone — well first of all, I wouldn’t have been watching Miracle on 34th Street in the first place because everyone is trash and thinks it’s boring please see above in re: Camus, Albert, but more importantly I’d have had to hide my emotions because unfettered sobbing isn’t anyone’s idea of Yuletide cheer on account of nobody has any taste.
I think I’ve made my point.
And come to that:
Appendix 19-A.47: YOU CAN BE SAD IF YOU WANT!
Real talk: the holidays are hard and being alone during them can be doubly so. And that’s okay! Feel your feelings because here’s the thing: trying NOT to feel your feelings is what derails Solo Christmas — and everything else, really. Because, that’s kind of how life works, right? The more you hold onto expectations and avoid things, the more you’re disappointed and the more they assert themselves, respectively.
So if you’re sad because your dude dumped you or your family’s a dick or there’s a Hefty bag full of decaying liposuction fat running the country or just because you watched a particularly manipulative episode of This Is Us (is there any other kind DON’T @ ME), that’s okay. Be sad bitch!
But in your sadness, just know these two things: no sadness lasts forever, and there’s no such thing as a perfect Christmas anyway.
EXCEPT FOR THE KIND WHERE YOU DO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT AND DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER TO ANYONE AND ALSO DO NOT EVEN NEED TO WEAR PANTS IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO WEAR PANTS🎉🎉🎉
So here’s to you, Solo Christmasers. Eat, drink and maybe — MAYBE — even be merry!
So there you have it, that was me telling you how good Solo Christmas is all the way back in 2017 and if you’d just fucking shut up and listened for once in your life you wouldn’t even NEED to be thinking about this in 2020 but that’s just you, isn’t it just? Always talking never listening just consumed by your own narrative all day every day well I’d say “Maybe THIS will finally learn you!” but I know it won’t. I know it won’t fuck you!
LOLJK I love you, you’re great. And I hope your Christmas is as good as Christmas 2020 can be. And if it sucks, look, we try again next year! But also, forgive me for this but ~*extremely Oprah voice*~ Christmas is just a day. Like Jesus isn’t real and neither is Santa and like it’s just a day! So make a list (and check it twice, beloved!) of things you like to do and eat and drink and then do and eat and drink them this weekend and then before you know it, Christmas will be over and it will be time to go back to normal life which is really just laying around doing and eating and drinking what you like isn’t it because there is pestilence and none of us has a job anymore so there’s nothing else to do HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh 2020 you scamp.
Anyway IDK I’ve said enough. Happy Holidays to you and yours please get vaccinated when the opportunity arises do not be a fucking asshole! We are leaving fucking assholery in 2020 ok? Ok thanks go eat some Peppermint Jo Jo’s.
I'm one of those assholes who loves their family but lives a continent away from them (Immigrant Chic, at its finest) and can't afford to fucking fly back to Peru every year during the most expensive time to book a flight, so I too have spent many Christmases alone (cause GOD, I WILL NOT SUFFER CHRISTMASES WITH FAMILIES OTHER THAN MY OWN, HOLY HELL) and...like, they're fine. Get yourself some bougie ass meal or whatever junk food your heart desires, indulge in all the movies, and it'll be ok. Thanks for writing this!