Getting through the first holidays without them

The dread starts in November and nobody mentions it. Here’s how to plan for a day you can’t avoid — and why the anticipation is often worse than the day.

Short answer: plan the day in advance rather than hoping to get through it, and give yourself explicit permission to change or skip traditions this year. Most people find the anticipation worse than the day itself. Deciding beforehand what you’ll do, who you’ll be with, and how you’ll exit if you need to takes most of the dread out of it.

The run-up is usually the worst part

This surprises people every year. The weeks before — the adverts, the shops, the invitations, the sheer visibility of everyone else’s celebration — are frequently harder than the day itself.

Part of it is that anticipation has no end point. You’re imagining the day repeatedly, in every possible configuration, for six weeks. The day itself, whatever happens, lasts a day and then is over.

Part of it is that the world gets loud about it. Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries are unavoidable in a way that ordinary grief isn’t — there’s no walking past them, and every shop and advert is a reminder that other people are having the version you’ve lost.

Knowing this helps, genuinely. A great many people report the same thing afterwards: it was awful in the run-up, and the day itself was survivable and occasionally even had good moments in it.

What would actually make it bearable?

There’s no right way to do this, and the useful question is what you can honestly manage this year. Six questions.

How to plan it

1. Decide rather than drift. The worst version is arriving at the day with no plan and no exit. Even a loose decision beats leaving it open.
2. Change something on purpose. A different house, a different meal, a different time. Replicating the day exactly tends to highlight the absence more than altering it does.
3. Keep what you genuinely want to keep. This isn’t a rule that traditions must go — some are a comfort. The point is choosing, rather than defaulting.
4. Plan how you’ll remember them. A toast, a candle, their favourite thing on the table, a walk somewhere. Unplanned grief tends to arrive at the worst possible moment; planned remembering gives it a place.
5. Arrange an exit in advance. Your own transport, a reason to leave early, a person who knows the signal. Knowing you can go often means you don’t need to.
6. Tell people what you need before the day. “I might be quiet,” “please don’t make a fuss,” or “please do mention him.” People are terrified of getting it wrong and will usually follow instructions gratefully.

Other people, and the well-meaning

Two things tend to go wrong, in opposite directions. Some people avoid mentioning them at all, in case it upsets you — which produces a strange day where the most important thing is unsaid. Others are relentlessly bright about keeping spirits up, which is exhausting to be around.

Both come from the same place: nobody knows what you want, and nobody wants to make it worse.

So tell them, in advance and specifically. “I’d love it if you mentioned Dad — I don’t want the day to pretend he wasn’t here” is enormously useful information to a family who have been anxiously avoiding his name. So is “I might need to go for a walk on my own at some point, and it isn’t about anyone.”

And accept that someone will say something clumsy. They almost always do, and it’s almost always fear rather than carelessness. You don’t have to manage their discomfort on top of your own — a short “thank you” and a change of subject is a complete response.

On the day, and after

Expect it to come in waves rather than steadily. Many people describe stretches of ordinary enjoyment interrupted by sudden, winding moments — often triggered by something small, like a song or someone’s laugh.

The good moments are not a betrayal. A lot of people feel guilty for laughing on the first Christmas, as though enjoying anything diminishes the loss. It doesn’t. Grief and pleasure coexist all the time; it’s one of the strangest and most useful things about it.

And the days afterwards can be flat in a way that catches people out — the thing you braced for is over, and there’s a kind of let-down. That’s normal too.

If the evening is the hard part — everyone gone, house quiet, the day finally over — that’s a very common shape, and it’s exactly the hour when nobody’s available. Iris is there then. Somewhere to say how it went, including the parts you smiled through, without needing anyone to be awake or to know what to say.

Frequently asked questions

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