New Essay: The Joy Of Holidays Alone

No family? No plans? You should be so lucky.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

I know what I’m about to say sounds insane and, to a vast majority of you, will come across as almost alarmingly sad, but trust me on this: the holiday season makes me feel lucky not to have much family. Thanksgiving Day is among my favorite occasions for staying home by myself and eating a normal meal as if it were any other Thursday. It feels like being given the ultimate hall pass. Actually, it’s even better than that. It feels like getting away with a victimless yet slightly wicked crime. 

Before I go any further, let’s get a few things out of the way. 

First, I did not spend this Thanksgiving alone. I went to the home of a friend who prepared a feast for dozens of guests. It was a lovely and delicious time, perfect in its own way. Let the record show that I am in fact an extremely social person. It’s not like I sit out Thanksgiving every year. I’d say I sit it out every other year. 

Second, the number of blood relatives I have is not zero. I have a brother, who I see somewhat regularly (though not generally on Thanksgiving). I have a smattering of cousins, who I see almost never. More significantly, I have a handful of friends with whom I am close enough to consider them family. But I have neither children of my own nor any nieces or nephews. My parents have both passed away, as have all of their siblings. Even if those aunts and uncles weren’t deceased, it wouldn’t matter much because my brother and I grew up barely knowing them and, as a result, would be hard-pressed to have recognized them on the street at any given point in our childhoods, much less adulthoods. 

Let me also make this clear: none of this estrangement was the result of any abuse, neglect, or malfeasance. For reasons I’ll never fully understand, my parents, especially my mother, wanted little if anything to do with their families of origin, especially once they had their own kids. (If you’re interested in my attempts to untangle my mother’s psychology, you can read the first essay of this book.) But the technicalities of my family dynamic are not the point of what I am saying to you right now. I only mean that it’s not like I’m an orphan or some kind of casualty of a massively toxic upbringing. It’s more like I’m a piece of ice that’s broken off a slightly larger piece of ice that was floating alone in the sea. 

I’m not sure what it says about me that my reaction to this upbringing was to avoid making a family of my own. I can see someone just as easily having the opposite reaction. If you grew up as one of four passengers on an ice floe to nowhere, I can imagine wanting to create a huge family, if for no other reason than to build a bridge back to the shore. But I went the other direction (as did my brother, though I won’t speak to his motivation), and not only do my circumstances elicit no regret, they occasionally induce a perverse euphoria. I know JOMO, or “joy of missing out,” is all the rage these days, but I was into it before it was cool. In fact, if JOMO were a sport I’d be a world-class endurance athlete.   

Admittedly, I have genetics to thank, since the other members of my frozen island family were or are largely the same way. But maybe there’s a mystical element somewhere in the mix, too. Not infrequently, while sitting alone with my thoughts, a feeling of peace will descend upon me that I can only describe as an almost divine awareness of the great luck of my own solitude. That is not to say the solitude itself is lucky (though maybe it is) but that having the ability to experience it as such is a stupendous stroke of fortune. Never is this luck more deeply felt than the Thanksgivings I spend alone.

In New York City, where I still keep a foothold despite keeping the other foot three time zones away, Thanksgiving Day swirls through the streets like the last of the leaves. I take special pleasure in walking through my neighborhood in the late afternoon of that day, when dinner guests carrying covered dishes begin emerging from subway stations and stepping out of Ubers. In the span of just a few blocks, you can witness a thousand celebrations in the making, each with its own set of Gordian family ties and unmeetable expectations. I see the same types time and again: the young man carrying supermarket flowers purchased en route; the gray-haired couple just in from the suburbs, bickering about where it’s safe to park the car; the harried families whose small children drop their stuffed toys on the sidewalk as their parents pull them along.

There’s a particular kind of young couple I see every year. They stand in building entries and scrunch their faces as they study the buzzer directory. They carry Mylar-wrapped bottles of wine and a dessert. One of them is slightly overdressed, as if nervous to impress. The other is looking at his phone. I’ve seen a dozen versions of this couple—they could be a same-sex couple or an opposite-sex couple; it doesn’t matter—and what I think to myself every time is that this is probably their first Thanksgiving together. I’ve imagined that one of them is meeting the other’s friends or family for the first time, and it is perhaps too early in their relationship for this kind of thing but what else can they do? I imagine they are staring straight into the barrel of the holidays and wondering whether they should be with this person at all. Or maybe they’re already wondering how they’ll ever live without this person.

I am cautiously happy for this couple. I am also profoundly happy not to be them. This is also what I feel about family life. I celebrate it in others, but personally I’m fine taking a pass. I recognize that this is a pretty bleak psychological map I’m laying out here. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a fundamentally fucked-up way to see yourself in relation to the world. But for whatever reason, this is the map upon which I’ve been able to chart a course for the most honest and valuable version of myself.

I’ve been wanting to write about this subject for a a long time, but I’ve always talked myself out if. For all my willingness to “confront” readers with “challenging” ideas, extolling the virtues of family-free living and solitary holidays always seemed like a bridge too far. I also know I’m practically begging for accusations of protesting too much. If she were really so happy not to have a family, she wouldn’t have to write 1,300 words telling us about it. 

But I’m writing about it now because I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I may be one of the few who admits as much, but believe me when I say that there are countless people out there who treasure their autonomy in ways they feel are practically illegal to say out loud. I know this because they tell me. And the reason they tell me is because I’m willing to tell you.  

On a Thanksgiving night about five years ago, I took my dog Phoebe out for her pre-bedtime walk around 10 p.m. We’d spent the day alone together, which chokes me up a little now to think about, since I would have to put her down a few years later (not long after my father died, no less). Rounding the corner, I saw a man standing on the sidewalk near the one building in our little enclave that has a doorman and might therefore count as “fancy.” He looked to be in his 40s and was wearing an expensive-looking overcoat and nice leather shoes. He was vomiting into the bushes. 

I turned my head out of respect, which I guess is another way of saying I hid my eyes out of embarrassment. I could only guess he was throwing up after drinking too much pinot noir in some well-appointed Beaux-Arts apartment. I imagined him self-medicating his way through the evening as everyone talked about what shows they were watching on Netflix. I wondered how he was going to get home. Would he throw up in a taxi? Would he pass out on the subway? I imagined how awful he was going to feel in the morning, how much he was going to wish he’d stayed home and done nothing. Of course, it’s possible I’d read the situation all wrong— maybe he had food poisoning or cancer—but I’m pretty sure I was right.

I think about that guy every year. The memory of that moment reminds me how grateful I am for the things I have. And how lucky I feel for the things I don’t.