I found Christmas the loneliest time of year. Then I started working at Crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/24/christmas-loneliest-crisis-charity

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The charity helped me rediscover a coping mechanism that eased my troubled childhood: gratitude, says author Kerry Hudson

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Christmas, but that I dreaded it. In my 20s I felt it looming as soon as the reduced bumper bags of Halloween Haribo were replaced on the supermarket shelves by squadrons of chocolate Santas – the first wave of attack for the Christmasification that would remind me of so much I wanted to forget every day until 1 January. As of November each year, Christmas and I were at war.

The reasons I gave to my friends and colleagues were legion, and largely reasonable. It was, I told them, the hen do of public holidays: organised fun with people you’d never choose as friends, wearing too many sequins and mainlining overly sweet booze from morning till night, to keep a grip on sanity. Though most people lost all sanity, anyway, when it came to buying presents. And then there was the tackiness, everything from reindeer boob jumpers to sprout-flavoured crisps – even your latte wasn’t safe from Christmasification. Plus it was expensive, commercialised – it was forcing us to string tinsel on the hardest bits. For someone who eschewed Christmas I played the Grinch beautifully, metaphorically pissing all over everyone’s tinsel.

Here’s what was actually going on. I have very few good memories of Christmas as a child. I did love it, or the idea of it, when I was a kid. I’d get stomach aches, I was so excited by Christmas Eve. But we were – even if we’d made sacrifices in the preceding months – extremely poor, and that poverty always loomed even larger for trying to make something out of very little.

We were an isolated, single-parent family, and we saw no family or friends. I sometimes heard from my dad but often didn’t. Otherwise it was just me, my sister and my mum. It’s true I don’t blame my mum one bit for breaking down, faced with our expectations. We knew from other people and telly what Christmas should be like, and that she wouldn’t be able to deliver it. But it’s also true that I don’t remember a single year without an upset, tears and shouting, and then a fragile, fearful making of peace that made my stomach hurt more than the excitement.

In adulthood, for the sake of my mental health, I estranged myself from my parents. At the time I had a partner, but soon discovered there were few things lonelier than spending Christmas with a family that wasn’t your own because yours was too complicated. When that relationship ended, I felt the full painful vulnerability of being alone. So every November and December I lived through the loneliest time of my life while it seemed everyone else was having the time of theirs. One New Year’s Day I cried with relief that it was over, and that there would be no more awkward questions about my plans, no more shamefacedly adding more than I needed to my grocery trolley to hide the meagre reality of my lonesome Christmas.

The turning point for me was volunteering for Crisis at Christmas. The joy that many of the visitors exhibited in the face of all they had come from and would go back to was truly humbling; and, like me, many of the volunteers were there because they were not with their families. I realised I was far from alone. There, I rediscovered the coping mechanism that had got me out of my troubled childhood: gratitude. I learned to appreciate every joyful, small thing.

I also realised that Christmas could be whatever you chose. I didn’t get into debt, I didn’t stress, I didn’t spend time doing anything I didn’t choose to. That choice and the gratitude for simple pleasures became the greatest gift I could have given myself in those years alone. I started treating myself gently, kindly, on those Christmases. I ate sausages and mash. I took long cycle rides though deserted London. One Christmas I lived in Buenos Aires, and listened to true crime podcasts while cooking a huge 2lb steak. I still avoided Christmas parties and Christmas jumpers because both inevitably brought me out in a rash.

I declined “Christmas orphan” invites and opted out of gift-giving, except for kids. Most of all, I refused to glitter up my sadness. I was honest and unashamed of my situation, and the more open I was, the more I learned that, in fact, not everyone was having the time of their lives. Many were simply muddling through, doing the best they could for themselves and others.

Now I love those weeks before Christmas, an excuse to be joyful – and, because of those darker times, I see so much more joy in it. And I look forward to the day itself, which is an excuse to eat and sleep in the daytime and watch a lot of TV. Now I have those things on my own terms, and I’m grateful for all the lessons those hard, lonely Christmases taught me. I’ve come to realise that a little glitter, offering up a little extra thoughtfulness to ourselves and others, is perhaps something that’s needed, especially this year. So Merry Christmas, whatever that looks like to you – here’s to kindness to others and ourselves, too.

• Kerry Hudson is the author of Lowborn