’Tis the Season to Be Melancholy – Enduring a Bout of Christmas Depression

Pic: Mike McCune

I have been suffering Christmas depression since I first became an adult. It was a long time coming because if truth be told my parents were as reluctant as I and my four sisters to give up the old rituals – we still put out our Santa sacks even in our late teens, although by that stage they were thankfully left under the tree rather than at the end of our beds. Perhaps it was after the last year of the Santa sacks that the Christmas depression first showed itself?

Here, for the record, are the symptoms: weeping uncontrollably at one’s desk; regretting the entire life course one has taken; and a pall covering everything as if one is living in a fake, Truman-style world that can offer nothing that is authentic or remotely interesting.

And perhaps the most clichéd of all, wishing fervently that Christmas could take place every second year instead of annually. Wouldn’t that be more sensible?

These kinds of seasonal depressions follow their sufferers around like drones. They seem to find us. We do not choose them. Anyone who, like me, suffers anxiety and depression throughout the year is a prime candidate.

Each year the scale of the attack is completely unpredictable. One year, swept up in a pre-Christmas deadline frenzy, the whole shemozzle completely passes me by; another year there might be faint twinges a few days before Christmas, while the following year I will be swamped by dark ruminations as soon as December hits its stride.

More than anything, their weapon of choice is the past. Reels and reels of negatives (the word having two meanings here) of all that is irretrievably lost. By a certain age we have all sustained many losses and regrets, but at Christmas some regrets seem to be more equal than others.

Namely not having a family of one’s own. Reading stories about families is a big no-no for me at this time. In fact you would think Monica Dux’s Things I Didn’t Expect (When I Was Expecting) would be a fine book for a single, child-free woman to read around Christmas, with its tales of collapsing vaginas, stigmatic nipples and psychopathic mothers’ groups. You’d expect someone like me to be sighing with relief and thanking Fortune I’d somehow wiggled my way out of that. And on one level I am. As a feminist, I certainly don’t feel a woman’s worth and identity depend on her status as a mother. It is the whole family orientation of Christmas that sinks the (Santa) boot in. When I found myself envying Dux despite (or perhaps because of) what she’d been through, I knew it was going to be a bad bout this year.

You’d also think getting into the thick of the shopping scrum would help, and it can for short periods. But if you stay too long you’ll be hit by a percolation of hissing irritation that threatens to bubble over into a bad case of mall rage. All these people with lines of children attached to them like charm bracelets, throwing money around like they’ve just had a big win at the races, are not fun or edifying for a single person to witness for long periods.

And if you’ve made a decision not to buy a lot of presents at Christmas, as I have this year, that leaves you without an important compensation for the Christmas frenzy – spending money on other people. Research suggests that no matter how much or how little you spend, it actually feels better to buy for others than to buy for yourself. As someone with ten nephews and nieces I’ve given up trying to pick a present for each one of them at Christmas; and while that saves me time and effort and helps the planet a tiny bit, it also robs me of a chance to leaven my Christmas depression with a dose of therapeutic giving.

Just because other people go through similar torment doesn’t mean you get to join a fellowship of sufferers. This is because there is something deeply personal about how we celebrate (or don’t celebrate) Christmas, demonstrating how individualistic our society has become. At this time, whether or not we are Christian, we are forced to withdraw from the social world and into the bosom of our family networks. And whether those connections are firm, fragile or merely frazzled, we are stuck with them like never before. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ we ask each other. We rarely say, for example, ‘Can I catch up with you on Christmas Day?’

This Christmas, I will play my usual role as black sheep in the Christmas nativity of my birth family. And I will be grateful to do so. I know a friend who is spending Christmas Day alone, and another friend who hosts a small gathering of fellow Christmas ‘orphans’ each year. I have decided not to extend an invitation to these friends, simply because I don’t want to impose the tricky-at-best family dynamics on them.

This reluctance to meddle with tradition also suggests that my own Christmas depression has become for me an inextricable part of the annual ritual, along with feeling left out because I can’t join my champagne-quaffing sisters on Christmas morning (dietary reasons), eating a kilo of roasted cashews before lunch to compensate, goading my father into political  arguments by making extreme left-wing comments while he tries to eat his Christmas pudding, and falling asleep in the spare bedroom at 5 pm precisely.

Despite the above, wishing all my blog readers a safe, peaceful and stress-free festive season.

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