The Joy, the Masks, and the Quiet Ache of the Holiday Season

Christmas shifts as you grow older. What once felt like pure magic now feels like something else entirely. When you’re a kid, it’s all excitement. The decorations, the gifts, the sheer feeling that this time of year is somehow different. The world feels brighter, like it’s pausing for something special. But as an adult, that feeling fades. Christmas isn’t really for you anymore. It’s for the kids.

For adults, Christmas becomes something else: a marker in time. Another year gone. Another reminder of what you did or didn’t accomplish. You find yourself looking back, tallying up the things you meant to do and realizing how many didn’t happen. Did you finally find love? Did you save enough money? Did you chase that dream you keep putting off? Probably not. You wonder if your life looks any different than it did last year, and more often than not, it doesn’t. The weight of it sits with you, quiet but heavy.

Another year older, maybe a little slower, a little grayer, a little more tired. But it’s not just you. Your parents, too. They look older every time you see them, and it’s impossible to ignore. The thought crosses your mind. How many more Christmases will they be here? You hate yourself for thinking it, but it’s there all the same.

The absences are sharper, too. The people who used to be here and aren’t anymore. Maybe they’ve passed on, or maybe they’ve just drifted away for reasons you try not to dwell on. Either way, their absence feels bigger this time of year. You look around the table and notice the empty chair. The loss feels heavier this time around. Even the people who are here carry their own burdens. Everyone has something they’re dealing with. A heartbreak, a setback, a quiet fear. And you can see it in their eyes if you look long enough.

As I’m writing this, I can only laugh at how ironic it is that I’m currently reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The way it lays bare the dynamics of families. How they gather, fracture, and mask their pain under forced smiles and awkward small talk. The family in the book tries so hard to come together for the holidays, but everything unresolved simmers beneath the surface, ready to spill over. It’s all there: the unmet expectations, the private sorrows, the performance of togetherness. Christmas with your own family might not be quite as dramatic, but it’s not so different, either.

But none of that is allowed to show, not today. Christmas comes with its own rules. You laugh, you tell stories, you smile for the photos, and you push the cracks deep enough down that no one else can see them. The whole day is a kind of performance, an unspoken agreement that, for the sake of the kids, you’ll pretend everything is fine. Because for them it still is.

The kids are the only ones who still get it. The magic, the excitement. It’s all real for them. You watch them tear into their presents with wild eyes, the kind of joy you can’t fake. Their happiness feels like a win, like the one thing that makes it all worthwhile.

But the moment doesn’t last. Once the paper is cleared away and the house quiets down, the weight of it all comes rushing back. Christmas for adults isn’t magic anymore. It’s a mirror showing you all the ways your life doesn’t measure up to what you hoped it would be. It highlights the gaps, the losses, the things you wanted but never got.

You remind yourself to be grateful. And you are. For the people who are still here, for the little joys, for the fleeting moments of warmth. But the gratitude doesn’t erase the other feelings. The sadness, the regret, the aching sense of time moving faster than you can keep up.

Life finds a way to twist the knife. The happiest times of the year double as the starkest reminders of your inadequacies, your losses, and your relentless march toward mortality. But that’s life, isn’t it? You take the bitter with the sweet, the shine with the shadow, and carry on.

Christmas is for the children, and it should be. For everyone else, it’s a reminder to keep moving forward, however gracelessly. Because what else can you do?

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