The holiday season can be a deeply spiritual experience, a period of profound depression, a rollicking good time, or a month-long migraine. The tradition you grew up in, the path you now follow, and the memories you bring to the season all color and shade the holidays—but whether they be bright or dark, those colors are always intense.
However you travel through the holiday season, writing can be your companion. You can use writing to deepen your spirituality, commune with others, and find peace. Writing can guide, sustain, and enlighten you; it can be a means of celebration or survival. Here are sixteen techniques to try.
1. Reminisce
Not everyone has beautiful childhood memories of holidays, but for those who do, writing those memories can be a lovely experience.
As a kid, I never had a bad Christmas, thanks largely to my mother’s willingness to bake, decorate, and spend days searching for the perfect gift. Holiday memories like those are so rich and evocative that they can serve as the source of vivid poetry, stories, and essays.
It’s easy to get sentimental about holiday memories. You can work against that sentimentality by adding an edge to your work, by showing little details that offset the saccharine nature of holiday stories, by giving a glimpse of the dark side of the season, or by incorporating humor.
But you don’t have to do that. If you find the holiday season all about sweetness, then go for it. Get mushy. Be schmaltzy. It’s what the season is all about.
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2. Reflect on the meaning of the day
According to Dave Barry, the holiday season is “a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.”
The holidays can be a disheartening smatter of advertisements, plastic decorations, and fake Santas. Depending on your tradition, this either means your most sacred time of year is being cheapened or you’re being forced to endure the relentless commercialization of an occasion you don’t even celebrate.
Write to get back to the meaning of the season. Remind yourself of the true reason for your holiday. You can’t stop the ads for the open-all-Thanksgiving-day shopping extravaganzas and Black Friday deals, but you can turn away from them. Turn your attention to the page. Find the meaning in words.
3. Write your own meaning
What do you do if you don’t follow a traditional religion but still want to celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah? Find your own meaning. For me, the original meanings of Christmas and Thanksgiving have lost significance. Instead, the holidays have become a time to reflect on my life, commune with people I love, and rest in the quiet of winter.
If you’re struggling with holiday traditions tied to religious beliefs you no longer have, writing can help you identify new meanings. Even outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins writes about what he calls the “modern meaning” of the holidays, as a celebration of family and friendship. “Celebration is not owned by any one culture and especially not by any one religion,” he writes. “It is part of our humanity.”
If the old meanings of Christmas or Hanukkah no longer ring true for you, find what does. Somewhere in the traditions lie symbols and meanings that will resonate for you. You can discover them through writing.
4. Return to a quiet place
“The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Unfortunately, the modern forms our holidays have taken make being “silent and apart” virtually impossible. Yes, the season should be a time of tranquility. But it’s not. It’s too busy. It’s too expensive. It’s too stressful.
Writing is one way to return to the silence Longfellow wrote about. To be apart—even when 28 relatives are celebrating in your house.
When the holidays start feeling hectic, use your writing to step away from the noise and busy-ness and find a quiet space inside. Use your writing as meditation. Write slow. Write with intention. Focus on your words.
5. Remember those you have lost
One of difficulties of the holidays is that they remind us of the people we can no longer celebrate them with. At no other time is the absence of a loved one felt more keenly.
Don’t deny yourself that grief: It is healthy, natural, and good. Instead, write it. Celebrate your loved one’s life on the page. Remember what they brought to the holidays in the past. Allow them to live again in words.
6. Write out your loneliness
Sports writer Jimmy Cannon called Christmas “a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected.” It’s true. If your life is sad right now, if you are alone, if your are troubled, the holidays can be brutal.
If the very idea of celebration feels like a mockery of your grief, then use your writing a different way: for sustenance. Writing has gotten many of us through dark nights we thought would never end. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer,” wrote Albert Camus. If your holiday season feels like the depth of winter, find that invincible summer in writing.
7. Vent
Getting together with the people we love may be the most joyous part of the season, but it can also be the most nerve wracking, even for close and loving families. Put fifteen relatives at the same dinner table, and just wait for the fireworks.
So vent. Just don’t do it by yelling, arguing, or (my own family’s favorite strategy) crying in the bathroom. Instead, do it on the page. Go ahead, be mean if you have to. Just make sure to tear up what you wrote, and no one will be the wiser. Except you: By getting a few things off your chest and keeping the family peace at the same time, you’ll be doing everyone a service.
8. Forgive
Old grievances have a nasty way of popping up this time of year. Ancient hurts—even ones we thought we’d forgotten—often appear at the exact season when we are expected to be merry.
What better time to practice forgiveness? And what better way to forgive than on the page? The person you are forgiving may never see what you write. They may have left you years ago. But you will know you are forgiving them. And by writing your forgiveness, you make it concrete. On the page, it becomes solid and sure.
9. Rejoice
We don’t rejoice much any longer. The very word seems old and sort of Biblical. But why should it be?
Whether you’re celebrating the birth of Christ, the rededication of the Temple, the longest night of the year, or simply life itself, write your joy onto the page. We all have reason to be filled with hope and delight. Rejoice! Rejoice! Let your pen rejoice!
10. Connect with those who are far away
Two of my siblings live in California, 1,500 miles from my home in Minneapolis. One lives in far-off Italy. I don’t see them often. These days, most of us have friends or family who live in other cities or states or even on other continents.
Take time in the holiday season to write to them. Yeah, write. Like, on paper with an envelope and everything. Create an actual document they can hold in their hands. Even if you can connect with them on Skype every day. Even if you can text them in a second. At this season of the year, take the extra time to use a pen and actually write.
11. Imagine alternatives
Not happy with the whole holiday thing? Just can’t get into the carols or the kvitlach or a large dead bird filled with soggy bread?
Write yourself a holiday. What alternative traditions would you invent? What songs could you sing? What would you eat, and how would you decorate your house? Your holiday can be a parody like the Festivus of Seinfeld fame. Or it can be something serious—something you even make real.
What would your perfect holiday be like? Write it out.
12. Write about a specific tradition
For the little girl me, Christmas was all about the music. Sure, I loved the presents—not to mention the food, the tree, the stockings hung by the chimney with care, and watching Dad try to string lights across our roof. But the music was the thing that charmed me. And it is the one thing I still gravitate toward in the holiday season. Yes, even those tired old songs you hear every year. Not the modern secular ones, but the older religious ones—Silent Night, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, The First Noel, and many more. Growing up, I new multiple verses of every single one. Love those songs.
So this year, I’m writing about them. Exploring why that music that so many people complain about still touches me. I’m thinking I might write a story or poem using the lyrics of my favorites, which I still remember.
What is the one part of the holiday season that makes you feel warm and fuzzy? What family tradition or community activity or religious ritual feels especially significant? Find that one thing. Write about it.
13. Write about your ancestors
“Just as Hanukkah candles are lighted one by one from a single flame, so the tale of the miracle is passed from one man to another, from one house to another, and to the whole House of Israel throughout the generations,” writes rabbi Judah L. Magnes.
Why do we celebrate the holidays? In part because they link us with the past—in some cases with more than 100 generations of ancestors.
We don’t honor ancestors the way older traditions do. Pretty much, we just forget about them. But maybe it’s time we gave those who went before us their due. And what better time than the holiday season, when we practice the traditions they handed down to us?
Write about your ancestors. Go back through the generations. Write about your grandparents and great-grandparents, and even about the ancestors whose names have long been forgotten. Imagine them, for they are in you. They’re lives reverberate in your own.
14. Spin off from your favorite holiday stories
Holidays are all about stories. The birth of Christ. The rededication of the temple. The reindeer returning with the sun in his antlers.
Spring off from them. Write variations on the old, oft-repeated holiday tales. Bring a fresh perspective to them. If you can’t imagine spinning off from a story out of sacred texts, think of Amahl and the Night Visitors, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti about a disabled boy who meets the magi on their journey to Bethlehem. Menotti used the ancient tale as the basis for an original work of art, while respecting the sacredness of the original. So can you.
And if that doesn’t work for you, start instead with some of the literatures that surround the holidays—from A Christmas Carol to Hanukkah folktales to a growing body of solstice stories for children.
There is a wealth of material out there—material that never goes out of style. Use it.
15. Write about flavors and scents
I fell in love with Hanukkah the first time I smelled latkes frying. Yep, that was the first Hanukkah experience I ever had, walking into the home of my friends, the Goldblums, and smelling those sizzling pancakes.
The winter holidays are filled with delicious smells and flavors. The fragrance of gingerbread and pine, the apple-spiced scent of Pagan wassail. The sweetness of hamentashen and almond cookies.
While aromas are often the most neglected of the senses in our writing, we can use the holiday season to change that. Go back to the aromas of your early holidays. The smell of latkes will always remind me of the Goldblums and the holidays I spent with them. My mom’s pie will always symbolize not only Christmas, but Mom herself, and her incredible talent at baking. Use the flavors and scents of the season as writing prompts. There is no telling where those prompts will lead you.
16. Find the humor
If you get grouchy during the holidays (and who doesn’t?), the best thing you can do for the seasonal blues is find the humor. Remember the time you burnt Thanksgiving dinner? The time you had to call a plumber on Christmas Eve? The cat who sent the fully decorated Christmas tree crashing to the floor, tinsel, lights, ornaments and all? (That one is mine: Thanks for the memory, Durango).
The holiday season, with all its family drama and enforced gaiety, makes for perfect humor. Take Jean Shepherd as your model: His recollections of Depression-era Christmasses, originally published as short essays, became the basis for one of the funniest holiday movies ever made, A Christmas Story.
17. Defeat marginalization
“Most Texans think Hanukkah is some sort of duck call,” quipped comedian Richard Lewis. He’s singling out one state there, but similar things could be said about the other 49.
The holiday season is overwhelmingly Christmas focused. Sure, we’ve gotten a little better in recent years about acknowledging the existence of Hanukkah, but those acknowledgements always feel sort of tacked on, like, “Wait. We’re forgetting something . . . Oh, yeah. We need a menorah somewhere. Let’s put one over there, between the manger and Santa’s workshop.”
If you’re Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, it’s even worse. What are you supposed to do with the month-long challenge that is the Christmas season?
One way is to write about your own spiritual and cultural identity. Use the pen to remind yourself of who you are, to work against the marginalization you may feel. Express yourself, assert your traditions, affirm your beliefs on the page. Use the examples of columnist Raja Abdulrahim and essayist Zeyd Ali Merenkov who write from different perspectives about what it is like to be Muslim at Christmas. If you feel your cultural identity being lost in the razzle-dazzle of Christmas, find it again on the page.
18. Give the gift of writing
“As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December’s bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same.” Novelist Donald E. Westlake captures an essential truth of the holiday season: The importance of those we love.
This holiday season, consider giving those people the gift of writing. What a pleasure to receive a truly well crafted and heartfelt poem about what you mean to someone! If not a poem, how about just a note–a beautifully written short letter telling the person how much they mean to you. You may have heard the story of Sister Helen Mrosla, the teacher who had students write the things they liked about each other, and how that simple activity changed their lives. Turns out, the story’s true.
Maybe you can change someone’s life, too–or just bring them a smile–by writing what you love about them.
As we start this holiday season, make a promise to yourself that you will find in it some degree of meaning, peace, and renewal, no matter what spiritual path you are traveling, no matter what memories (joyful or painful) you bring to it, no matter what your life circumstances may be. Use the pen and the page to help you keep that promise, to create a season that will sustain you for the new year.
Have a blessed holiday season. And don’t forget to write.
I like this idea, and I will do this. Thank you.
Regards,
Gaye
I’m glad you liked the post, Gaye.