When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies

Why the holiday season just isn't fun anymore

Well, Linus, another Halloween has come and gone.

In my last two newsletters, I spoke of my love for the holiday and how we only get so many Octobers in our lives and therefore should make the most of them. This is something I always try to do but often feel like I fail at. No matter how many fall-themed activities I engage in—all the apple orchards, haunted house attractions, Halloween parties and book festivals—I inevitably end up feeling like I missed an opportunity or squandered the gift of spooky season.

With my grandmother on Halloween 1978

For me, this ennui has become typical to all holidays. Part of it is being an introvert, part of it is getting older, but a bigger contributor is that there is so much pressure to have an absolute blast on holidays that it makes having that good time unobtainable. Celebrating the holiday season involves preparation, spending money frivolously, and enduring copious amounts of time with others, including people we don’t even like. Outfits, huge meals, presents, travel—it’s a lot of work for little payoff. In recent years, I’ve been more inclined to lowkey celebrate holidays at home, watching Halloween IV or Silent Night Deadly Night for the hundredth time. Ignoring Christmas is easy because I’m not a fan of that holiday to begin with, but a feeling of disconnection on Halloween is another matter. I love Halloween. Always have. It’s easily my favorite holiday for obvious reasons. But I can’t deny that my excitement for it has waned over the past five years or so. I’ve gone from being the guy with the spookiest house on the block to not even living on a block. I get zero trick or treaters. I don’t decorate because my house is isolated, so who would even see the decorations? This year I didn’t even carve a jack-o’-lantern, even though I went to a pumpkin patch with that in mind. I just found myself staring at them, wondering why I was going to waste money and make such an effort when my everyday life had already exhausted me, so I left without one and don’t regret it, which may be the saddest part of all.

What my previous house looked like on Halloween in 2014

A big part of my explanation for this is that life gets in the way. I have a career and a mortgage. There’s writing to do and book signings to attend. There’s housework, repairs, chores, and errands. Maintaining some semblance of a social life is torturous enough without big celebrations. In the past, I’ve put too much pressure on myself to enjoy Halloween to the fullest because I feel a stronger connection to it than any other day of the year. But that pressure, coalesced with my own overzealous expectations, always left me wanting more from Halloween than it could possibly deliver. There’s only so much we can do to force a good time upon ourselves. Having effectively spoiled the holiday by loving it too much, I started scaling things back, hoping to regain some of the magic by not making such a big deal about it.

That it was 77 degrees on Halloween day here in New England certainly didn’t help matters, but mostly it’s the strange combination of the fear of missing out and the sense of something being forever lost that has kicked in my holiday doldrums a little early this year.   

When I was a kid, holidays were magical even when my homelife was unhealthy, but the bloom is off the rose and has been for longer than I’ve wanted to admit. The joy of Christmas, Halloween, and birthdays is fresh and new when we’re young. As we age, that gleam fades, reality’s dullness sets in, and the holidays become more of a chore because you’re already overloaded by life. To quote an article from Psychology Today, “with their increased social, financial, and other expectations, holidays are a virtual trigger bouquet whose pain we turn upon ourselves.”

Christmas triggers my trauma. I lost my mother to a grueling battle with cancer during the Christmas of 2011. My marriage collapsed in Christmas of 2017 (I don’t regret the divorce at all, but the memories of that horrible time still sting). Last December, my beloved dog Bear passed away just three days after Christmas. Add to this my years of suffering in retail, where I got to see the true face of Christmas in the pinched, mean, bitter faces of the entitled American consumer, and I think anyone could understand why I don’t celebrate it anymore. I may feel apathetic toward other holidays, but Christmas is one that I completely despise. It’s not just that it unearths such painful memories; it’s that the holiday insists upon itself. It literally shouts at you to “be merry” through the entire month of December (as if being happy for four weeks straight is remotely possible). It makes empty promises of joy and peace but delivers the opposite. But as rough as hating it can be, dreading it is even worse. I’ve had such terrible things happen on so many Christmases that I almost expect tragedy to come with it like some annual curse. I tried to salvage the holiday from my personal wreckage, making it my own with horror-themed Christmas décor and such, but to no avail. The holiday hates me as much as I hate it. But while I’ve moved on from Christmas, Christmas will never move on from me because society won’t allow that. People can’t stand it when you tell them you don’t like Christmas, like it fucking matters. How could you not like the most wonderful time of the year?

My favorite ornament.

The loss of wonder is an unfortunate side effect of growing up. With age can come anhedonia, for some more than others. This is why so many of us complain that things just aren’t as good as they used to be. It’s why we say “it just doesn’t feel like the holidays this year” every fucking year.

Some of you are reading this thinking I’m merely a sourpuss or contrarian, hating on the holiday season just because I’m supposed to like it. That’s an inaccurate oversimplification. I know many of you are nodding at all this humbuggin’ because you feel it too. It’s like when The Nothing came in The Never-Ending Story. It’s not one issue or obstacle that strips the joy out of certain things but rather an undefinable emptiness that tears the joy out of everything.

To reference another ’80s movie:

Here’s a segment from an article I wrote on nostalgia back in 2023:

You will never again experience the joy you felt in your youth. Nostalgia tries to recreate what is forever gone, and in that process, we set ourselves up for endless disappointment. Christmas will never be as magical as it was when you still believed in Santa, because now you know your parents were just lying to you (which is the best lesson any kid could get about life). Watching the pearls fall off the neck of Bruce Wayne’s mom over and over with different actors is never going to make you feel the way you do about whatever version of Batman you grew up with. In the immortal words of Thomas Wolfe: “you can’t go home again.” One can never fully “go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… away from all the strife and conflict of the world… back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time.”

Now here’s a clip of one I wrote about spending the holidays alone, which is either depressing or uplifting depending on the way you look at it:

Some folks find it sad to not to have any family to spend the holidays with. I’ve certainly had friends show me unwanted pity in the past because I’m an adult orphan and live alone. But the upside is I don’t have to go anywhere for the holidays or eat dinner with people I don’t like. So before you feel sorry for me for spending holidays alone, remember this: while you’re dealing with your alt-right grandpa or always-offended liberal niece or whoever it is that pushes your nuclear detonation buttons, I’ll be perfectly content at home watching old movies while I gorge myself on pumpkin pie.

The holidays we experience as adults are nothing like the ones we experienced when we were young. It’s naive and self-destructive to impose such expectations upon ourselves. Dressing up for Halloween or decorating your Christmas tree is not immature, but it’s understandable to have outgrown such things, and totally okay to lack holiday spirit altogether. I will never not love Halloween, but how I express that love has changed as I’ve reached middle-age. Its specialness is in my heart and, like most of what I keep in there, it’s become increasingly more difficult to share it with others. Maybe there’s little magic left, but there is a sincere, intense sentimentality. I’ve just had to learn not to let that sentimentality give me anxiety when I try to have holiday fun, or sadness when I’m incapable of it.

Sometimes it’s 77 degrees on Halloween and there are no trick ’r treaters.

Sometimes we lose the ones we love at Christmastime.

Sometimes having fun is simply impossible.

The holidays aren’t for everyone. Don’t let bullshit traditions and social pressure twist your arm or make you feel somehow flawed. And if you do like the holidays, never push people to celebrate when they don’t want to—you’re not helping anyone regain their cheer, you’re just making them feel inadequate for not seeing things the way you do. For some of us, giving the finger to all that comes with this season is our best shot at having a merry time.

Of course, I’m not saying I won’t ever dress up or carve a pumpkin again. That’s absurd. I’m also not saying I’ll never give someone a holiday gift or sit down at a huge Thanksgiving spread again. I’m merely accepting that I don’t need to do what everyone else is doing (and usually don’t want to). This is a self-imposed exclusion. I’ll get spooky however I see fit. It’s something I do all year long anyway, and I like to think I’ve gotten pretty darn good at it!

There’s no wrong way to celebrate.

So if you’re just not feeling the holidays this year or next year or for the rest of your life, just know you’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for bowing out—not even your mom. The holidays aren’t mandatory no matter how much other people try to make you think they are. Such people are only interested in what they want, not what is best for you. They want their holiday to be perfect and think they need your presence for it, but you know something they don’t—holidays are never perfect. They always leave you wanting something more, something no longer in reach if it ever was. You’re chasing the dragon. And the older you get, the easier it is to recognize that.

For those of you who don’t feel the same way, I still wish you a delightful holiday season, but for those of you who relate to what I’ve written here, hopefully this makes it easier for you to face what’s coming these next few months. You can either reinvent your way of celebrating the holidays, as I did with Halloween, or simply let them go, as I did with so many others.

It’s your holiday, your season, your life.

Do it your way.

Until next time, keep reading, and try to be happy.

Your pal,

Kris