Family
When the Holidays Make You Overly Sentimental
Here's how to embrace it.
Lily Qian
I turned 70 this year — a milestone that has choked me up with a giant knot of nostalgia.
This is the chapter of life when reality collides with memory, when “now” merges with “then.” I expect to be teary from Thanksgiving through Christmas, and all the way to “Auld Lang Syne.”
I am wired to be sentimental. Are you?
Do you cry over Publix holiday commercials? Or cradle each 30-year-old Christmas tree ornament as you lift it from the storage box? Do you find yourself sighing deeply and remembering when your kids were little, and they woke you up at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, shouting “Santa came! Santa came!”
Do you wish you could have just one more Thanksgiving with a crowded kitchen, when your mom was alive and helped you mash the potatoes? One more year when nothing traumatic had happened?
If so, there is no “self-help” solution to limit your longing. Instead, lean into the “bittersweet” feelings the season brings.
Author Susan Cain defines the “bittersweet” this way: “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death — bitter and sweet — are forever paired.”
The holidays are the baggage-claim area of our psyches. That trunk load of memories from Christmases Past shows up on the carousel like clockwork — and our emotions wander from the “what is” to the “what was.”
That wandering is a bittersweet longing, a search for what we once considered perfection. It is a search for home.
Some of us wander more than others.
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“Some of us inhabit the bittersweet state instinctively, always have; some of us avoid it as much as we can; some of us arrive there when we reach a certain age, or after facing life’s trials and triumphs…” Cain writes in her book “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.”
And yet, it is life’s fragility that magnifies its beauty, writes Cain, who dedicates her book to poet/musician Leonard Cohen.
“There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” he wrote.
If you have a beautifully fragile soul this holiday season, consider these three things…
Embrace the world as it is, not as you want it to be: If you’re sad or sentimental, cry. Let it go. Trying to suppress emotions makes them more intense, psychologist Susan David said in a popular TED Talk about “emotional agility.”
“You might think you’re in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you,” she said. “Internal pain always comes out. Always. When we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
Seek comfort in a corny Hallmark movie: Hallmark’s loop of syrupy Christmas romances is a balm for the bittersweet. “When life is hard, Hallmark is easy,” “The New York Times” wrote to celebrate The Hallmark Channel’s 25th anniversary this summer. “In a Hallmark movie, love wins, Mom lives and it’s Christmas all year round … Hurt people watch Hallmark. They watch it from empty nests and hospital bedsides … They just want something that’s going to help them sleep at night.”
Two days before she died, my mother watched a Hallmark movie about a woman with amnesia. Mom was literally on her last gasps, yet she could repeat the film’s dialogue. It comforted her.
Hallmark has made several movies featuring a main character with amnesia. This particular one was “Christmas on My Mind,” about Lucy, a woman who slips on ice, cracks her head, wakes up with a wedding dress in her hand — and thinks she is on her way to marry her small-town boyfriend Zach. Oops! Lucy had blacked out and forgotten the events of the past two years — and now Zach is her ex and she’s engaged to someone else in the big city.
Of course, Lucy and Zach find their way back to each other. It’s Hallmark!
Ask yourself: where has my heart found a home? Seek out that place, even if you find it only in your mind and your memories.
What do you long for? If you miss dear family members or friends, reach out to them. If they have passed on, spend time with their memory. If you’re alone and lonely, use the Hallmark formula and find a holiday fair and some hot chocolate.
The reality of Christmas Present is this: each holiday is a chance for a new memory.
Last year, I had planned to visit beloved friends in Denver, as I have for many Christmases. They are my family … they even hang personalized stockings for me and any of my children who happen to show up.
My plans changed when my beloved dog Pippin, my rat terrier/chihuahua mix, died of cancer on Dec. 17. That dog had been by my side for 12 years. I felt bereft and almost paralyzed by the pain.
I had an overwhelming longing to go home, to the place where I grew up.
At the last minute, I flew home to Palm Beach County, Florida.
On Christmas Eve, I went to dinner with three of my daughters at my favorite restaurant. After dinner, we had drinks at the gorgeous and festive home of two of our dearest friends. On Christmas, we spent a languorous afternoon sipping wine and snacking and joking at the home of a family my kids have known since birth.
It was glorious. A new memory, different from Christmases past but equally beautiful … and worthy of remembering.
Do any of you get sentimental during the holiday period? Let us know in the comments below.
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