Your Happyish Holiday Traditions
The happyish holiday season can be whatever the heck you want it to be, no matter what pressures you feel from family and friends and society. So, here’s to creating new traditions – and to the Terribles who shared theirs with us (and with you).
—
Support our new independent production (and get bonus content galore!) by joining TTFA Premium. We now offer tiers as low as $4.99 / month. Sign up.
Our email subscribers get first dibs on ticket sales, new merch, show announcements and more. Join our mailing list here.
You can catch up with TTFA on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook using @ttfapodcast. Nora's Instagram is @noraborealis.
—
Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
Surprise, surprise, everybody. This is a special little treat. Happyish Holidays is not over. This is our second Happyish Holidays episode of the year, because we're technically kind of, like, in the mid-swing of them. Hanukkah is about to start. It's about to be Christmas. Then it'll be New Year's, and then we can all just ride on into that perpetual self-improvement train. New Year, New You. Blah, blah, blah.
I will not be doing that. I encourage you to also try to resist that. I would say New Year and Possibly The Same You. Possibly even a worse version of you if you like. Whatever. New Year, Whatever You Shows Up.
The point is, we are still in the middle of the holidays and this year we had kind of just an embarrassment of riches when it came to Happyish Holidays content. We are now an independent production. We can do things however we want. And so when I look at the team and I say, “Do you want to do another Happyish Holidays episode this year?” They say, “Sure, yeah, we can.” Because I had so many ideas, I had so many things that I wanted to talk about, I would throw out prompts. We got so many emails, we got so many voicemails. And one thing that emerged as a theme was traditions, and their need to evolve or be just thrown out the window entirely.
I got a lot of messages about people who were making their own traditions or attempting to, people who did it out of necessity or inadvertently. And I wanted to dig into that in this episode, because if there is one thing that deserves to be celebrated during this time of year, it's Toyotathon.
I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Honestly, I'm a Honda Days girl myself. I dream of being the kind of woman who could have a Lexus December to Remember. But I am currently a woman who drives a used Ford with a car payment.
So the point is: If there's anything that should be celebrated, it is people being brave enough or smart enough to realize that the status quo isn't cutting it for them anymore. It's just not an easy thing to do.
So.
I am Nora McInerny. This is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” A bonus episode of Happyish Holidays from all of us and from all of you.
And we're going to start out today by reading a couple email submissions.
“My worst holiday memory that comes to mind was the time that I drove for hours in icy New England winter weather to attend Thanksgiving with my family that live near the Canadian border. I brought my boyfriend with me, and we rushed like crazy to get there for Thanksgiving dinner.
“My family has always had this weird thing with holidays, like it's a mandatory event, even though half the time you wonder if they even care that you're there beyond being merely physically present. I'd gotten into a fight with my cousin when I asked a week prior if there was any way to hold dinner past 2PM.” I’m sorry. Past 2PM? “So we could take our time getting there isn't 2PM lunch?” Yes, it is, listener. 2PM is lunch. “And needless to say, that didn't go over well.”
Actually, that is needed to say, because who would not understand that you trying to arrive at the Canadian border for a 2PM dinner? No, that is lunch. You would have to wake up very, very early to do that. That … that seems like a very reasonable ask to me.
“So we made it on time only to basically be ignored by most of the family while we were there. Per usual, my family was stowing leftovers away in the basement before the last person had even finished putting food on their plate.” Wow. This is like Thanksgiving Express.
“By what felt like 6PM, we were back in our hotel room an hour away in my hometown, the same town where my mother and sister live. My mother was too busy to spend time with me because she wanted to spend time with her boyfriend, a theme in my mom's relationship with her adult children. My sister is busy spending time with her fiancee that she lived with. So we had gotten up at the ass crack of dawn to drive almost six hours, only to be sitting in a hotel room where literally everything in the state is shut down because it's a holiday, with no food, and my family spending time with the same people they see every single day instead of the people they guilted into being there. We ended up eating gas station tortilla chips and cookies in the hotel room alone and leaving the next day. That was the last Thanksgiving I ever went back home. The next year, I bought my own home and started a tradition with my roommate of the two of us making a whole Thanksgiving dinner for the two of us. I mean it. I made four pies for two people. And we made all our favorite foods the way we liked them made. I was broke as could be, but it was worth every penny. It was the best. I brined a turkey from a local farm. I had literally never made turkey and spent weeks researching recipes. So Alton Brown, if you're listening, thank you. We had leftovers galore and got to nap afterward on our own couch and watch our favorite shows. We continued the tradition for eight years before my roommate moved away. These are some of my best adult holiday memories ever.
–
“A few years after divorcing my father, after my mother came out of her room and started dating a new man, my older sibling and I decided we wanted to have a proper Thanksgiving meal. We planned and executed the whole thing. In our family, we've always had lasagna and meatballs before the turkey because it's a marathon, not a sprint.” I love that.
“I was maybe 20 at the time and had a very small son, and my older sibling was still living near us, so we planned the whole thing for all of us and all our siblings, just like we remembered. And it was awesome. But my mother was so focused on her new boyfriend that she took what was usually an all-day marathon of eating and chatting and hanging out and crammed it into just two hours.”
I got to intervene here. Two hours to eat meatballs and lasagna and turkey? I'm in pain knowing that. I'm in pain.
“Rushing from one meal to the next so she could go have another Thanksgiving with her new boyfriend's big Italian family. When it was happening, we almost didn't notice. Then dinner was over and my mother was gone. And that's when you get smacked in the face by that, ‘I've just been used’ feeling. It didn't feel great.”
“So at Christmas time, my siblings and I were talking about how we wanted to do something, but how we didn't want to stick to our usual traditions just to feel used and disappointed all over again. So we said, ‘Fuck it. Let's have a pizza party.’ We literally made pizza all day. We invited all our friends over and they all showed up at different times. It was like an awesome revolving door of fresh pizzas and friends. It was honestly one of the best Christmases I've had in a long, long time. I'm not happy we felt so used at Thanksgiving, but I'm proud we learned and adapted so quickly.”
We'll be right back.
–
TTFA Caller 1: It had been five and a half years since my beautiful husband died of cancer when I was 28 years old. And that first holiday season, after not drinking during the entirety of my relationship with him, I got drunk, and I drove my car, and I wrecked it. And because I could not call the police since I had been drinking, I drove it home. I then got a rental car, which I proceeded to drink and drive and wrecked. And my very first support group that I went to that took me about three cigarettes to smoke to even walk into, I found out that every single person in that support group who had lost a child or a spouse or someone very close to them, we had all wrecked our cars within the first year of loss – whether alcohol was involved or not. And I had been so hard on myself about it until I learned that. So since I had wrecked my car, I could not drive from Orlando, Florida to Jacksonville a couple of hours north. And my parents, who have been happily commuting and carting my other adult siblings around for decades, said that they would not come get me a couple hours south to bring me back to our family home to spend the holidays together.
So, my first Christmas Eve without my husband, I went to a bar. I drank too much. I tipped way, way, way too much out of guilt for knowing that I basically had gotten too drunk on Christmas Eve. I sat down on the chaise lounge in the bar, watching a very sweet, romantic couple, kissing and enjoying each other and just feeling so sad. And I passed out. I passed out on the chaise lounge. And they had to wake me up and kick me out. This is a place where I was a regular at.
And then the next day, on Christmas Day, I did the very cliche. I went to a Vietnamese noodle shop and I ate Vietnamese noodles by myself on Christmas Day. And I remember everybody in there with their families and the workers just really looking at me with pity. And I basically haven't celebrated the holidays since. And it's my first year that I think that I may actually do some kind of celebrating.
And so for anybody who is still in that place of recklessness, overdrinking, shutting the world out, being so full of rage and depression, I can't say that it will get better for everyone, or that there won't be major losses, of course, after that first major loss. But I do know now that it is possible to come through that dark place and to find some semblance of hope and connection. And I have found that my ritual of making sweet tea, which I don't drink, but my husband did, and making his favorite dishes and just setting them on the table, there's like this whoosh of relief that goes through me of like, “Okay, Gregory has been acknowledged. He has loved his here in the way that he can be here.”
TTFA Caller 2: When I was growing up, we always spent Christmas Eve with my dad's family and Christmas Day with my mom's family. But when I married my husband, he had two sisters who didn't celebrate at all with their in-laws. And so they were together Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, all day, Christmas dinner. And my mother-in-law was one of those manipulative, difficult people who couldn't understand why we wanted to spend any time anywhere else but with her. So for eight years, Christmas was a nightmare for us and the kids. The kids couldn't look at their own presents because we had to get them up and home to my mother in law's house and we had to spend as much time with her as possible, or she was just throwing a fit all the time. We still tried to spend Christmas Eve with my family, but Bob's mother would start calling in September saying, “Are you coming to my house for Christmas Eve?” It was horrible.
So when we moved about an hour and a half away, and we were on the other side of a treacherous canyon, we moved in August, and we told everybody from the beginning that we weren't going to come home for Christmas, that we would come the week before or the week after on Sunday, but we wouldn't come on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. And we got a lot of crying and carrying on and phone calls about that, but we just stuck firm to it. And we got down to Christmas Eve with our three boys and we didn't know what we were going to do. And we kind of looked at each other and went, “Well, this is weird, because we have always been told what to do for so long.”
So we took the kids to the show, we went to see “Aladdin,” and then we came home and we had shrimp and scallop scampi and had a wonderful Christmas Eve all by ourselves. And then Christmas Day we got up and I cooked a prime rib roast, because that's what everybody voted for. And we just laid around and the kids got to spend the time they wanted with their presents or with their friends. And it was just wonderful.
My kids are all on the spectrum somewhere, and so they didn't really enjoy a lot of family chaos. And so from then on, we just spent Christmas at home alone with our three kids and it was wonderful. And the family in the other town finally got used to the idea, but it was the best thing we ever did, and we all were so much happier because it was not a big pressure from both sides of the family.
TTFA Caller 3: I'm calling about the holidays as a grieving person and the gifts that I have learned to give myself. I'm 34 years old. My husband died when I was 28, a few years after my dad died. And I think it took me at least a few years to get to a point of recognizing that not only do I not have it in me to do the old traditions, I don't really want to. And so that is one of the greatest gifts that I've given myself is to be able to say no. For example, I do not go to my childhood home to spend time with my parents and siblings at the holidays, because like so many families, it's already fraught with stress and dysfunction and unhealthy boundaries, lack of boundaries. And so throwing my grief into the mix is just not something that's good for anybody, most especially me. So I love to find there are usually restaurants or catering companies that will do like a Thanksgiving meal for one. And you can pick up your individual serving of turkey and cranberry and all of the fixings so that I'm still getting a little bit of that nostalgia and the food that I and so many of us do love, but without putting the pressure on myself to cook it or show up anywhere.
Yeah, I actually, I don't even give physical gifts to people the way that I used to, because, frankly, I've always been a big gift giver. And after many, many years of giving wedding gifts, engagement gifts, baby shower gifts, new job gifts, and then my husband died and there were no widow gifts! And I thought about all the thousands of dollars that I invested in other people's celebration that when I was going through the worst time in my life, they couldn't even, like, send me an Uber Eats meal.
So I'm more of a card giver now, and that money that I save goes to getting myself a massage or a nice meal or whatever it is.
TTFA Caller 4: So I got the email asking, “What holiday traditions have you opted out of?” And I’ve opted out of two. One, instead of doing turkey for Thanksgiving, doing German hamburgers, which are kind of like meatloaf, kind of like hamburgers, with German mashed potatoes, which are also superior to American mashed potatoes thanks to my German partner. Highly recommend.
Second, Easter this year, didn't go to church, didn't spend time with immediate family. Instead, visited the German partner who was on a business trip in L.A. and spent the weekend in California with extended family eating real Mexican food in Southern California. Can't recommend it enough. Also, there is a mariachi band. My only advice would be if you don't like traditional stuff, don't do it. There are fun alternatives.
TTFA Caller 5: I'm calling to talk to you about what we do to take care of ourselves during the holidays. About five years ago, we started just not doing them. We went to an Airbnb, went to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. And the first time it, I felt like such a piece of shit, like I was abandoning my family. And then we kept doing it. And it felt so good to just take time away and not have to focus on just the money aspect of it. The spending money, or the spending time, or the … just giving pieces of yourself during those three months of the year where everyone expects it all of you. And instead, just taking time for ourselves. And it's a ritual that we do every year now. And it's been such a huge help in setting boundaries for myself and for my family. And I know it's not a novel concept, but it's something that was really novel for me. And I'm still fighting to be challenge to accept, like just pushing against those boundaries of a holiday and the expectations and almost rebelling against it by not doing it. And it's just a lovely way to honor myself.
TTFA Caller 6: I have struggled for a lot of years being the adult in charge of the family’s Christmas and usually winding up in a major meltdown about a week out from Christmas. And so I finally was like, “Well, what can I do to get myself, you know, through the days of the holidays and to Christmas Eve and not totally lose my shit?”
So last year I bought a bunch of Advent calendars, because they make me happy. So there was a tea Advent calendar. There were multiple chocolate Advent calendars for each family member. There was a crafting Advent calendar for my daughter and I. There was like the kids toys Advent calendars. It was like a half a wall of Advent calendars, and it made me so happy. I got to start every day with a different cup of tea, and it just set the mood and it helped me progress from day to day over what I just find to be a very difficult responsibility time that does not have the same joy in it as an adult as it did as a kid. But hopefully my kiddos look back and think, “Yeah, Advent calendars! They're so fun.”
TTFA Caller 7: My husband passed in June of 2018, and that year for Thanksgiving, I literally did not have the wherewithal to do the big family gathering and watch everyone be happy while I pretended that it was okay. So my daughter at the time had worked for Macy's, and we decided that we were going to go to the Macy's parade. So my other daughter and her husband and I and my daughter's fiance all went to the parade, while my oldest worked the parade. And then we got a takeout prepared Thanksgiving dinner in her New York apartment and gathered around a tiny little table. And we just celebrated my husband. And it was so much easier to break that tradition and not have to watch everyone else be happy with their families. Since that time, we've kind of gone back to doing the usual. But I have to say, that is one of my fondest memories. And I actually stayed over in New York City by myself in a hotel that evening prior to that, and it was definitely a gift to myself. So for me, it's just allowing myself, which is something as a codependent I don't do to do something for me that I really needed to do.
We’ll be right back.
—
“My name is Sarah, and my mom died August of 2015 when I was 20 years old. That Christmas, my family all was pretty still griefed up.” I love that phrase. “And no one was excited about the idea of presents or any festivities, really. We all decided to scale back to just one or two presents each, then take all of the money that we would have spent on more gifts and the money that we would usually spend on Mom and give it to a leader of our church to help a family in need have a good Christmas. It almost felt like we were resigned to being sad for the holidays, so we might as well let someone else not be sad.
“A few days before Christmas, one of my friends asks me if I can help her with an assignment she got to go shopping for a family for Christmas. It wasn't until I got there and she was talking about the anonymous donation the church got that I realized that this was our Christmas money that we were using. I was a little excited to see what toys we were going to get these kids. But when I looked at the Santa’s wish list that we got from the kids, all of the things were clothes or new tennis shoes or a blanket for their baby brother. These children were dreaming of getting things that I considered necessities. It was one of those humbling moments that I thought only happened in Christmas specials.
“When I got home that night, I told my dad about all the things we were able to get for that family and just sobbed. Now, I've made it a tradition every year to adopt a kid through Angel Tree as a reminder of that honestly terrible Christmas without Mom that somehow turned out to be the best Christmas.”
I remember doing that once, and the kid asked for a toaster oven, and I sent him a toaster oven. But then I also Googled “best gifts for a 10-year-old” and just bought him a bunch of stuff that I hoped would make him happy because I was like, “Oh, no, he's using his Christmas wish for a toaster oven for his family.”
–
“For my brother Tom's 40th birthday, our family took a trip to New York City. Tom and I went a few days early so we could hang out. One night, we were searching for something yummy for dinner, but every place we looked up was booked. We walked by a restaurant called BLT Steak.” This restaurant is amazing. “The menu looked great, but there was a long line of folks waiting to get in. Tom said, ‘Let's give it a try.’ We walked past the long line straight to the host. Tom flirted a little, told him we were in from out of town and admitted we didn't have a reservation. We were immediately escorted to a great table.
“Shortly after being seated, a basket of piping hot, cheesy popovers were served, and they were the best things I've ever tasted. Tom took the recipe home and made the popovers for Christmas dinner later that year … and for the next seven years. It became our tradition to watch them puff up to the size of our hands and then gobble them up while they were still warm.
“In 2013, Tom died after a nine-month battle with pleural effusion lymphoma. For the past nine years, it's been my job to carry on the tradition. We call them the Tom Pugh Memorial Popovers, and they are still the tastiest things I've ever eaten. Even though it barely feels like Christmas without him, the popover smoothes the rough edges and give us something to look forward to.”
–
In my experience, any time a tradition starts to feel like a prison sentence is when I know it's time to let it go – or that it's okay to let it go. And becoming a parent – and I am, I am a parent in a very complicated way – and if you are … this the first episode you're listening to, that's because my first husband died and then I remarried, and we have a blended family, and only one out of our four children is not traumatized. And having a blended family is an exercise in adapting and developing new things that work for your family and incorporating bits and pieces from all of your previous lives, your childhood, your dead partner's childhood, your current partner's childhood, your children's childhood. It's sort of like a constantly evolving and shifting set of what you do and what you stop doing.
And I never want anyone that I love to feel like they are beholden to do something because it's what quote unquote, “we've always done.” I want them to only do the things that feel comforting and feel good to them in that moment.
We have a few loosely held traditions in our family right now, and one is that from Thanksgiving on, we're only watching Christmas movies, baby. Okay? If my TV is on, I am watching a Hallmark movie, a Netflix movie, a Hulu movie. I am watching a Lifetime movie. I'm watching a very flimsy plot that takes place in a small town obsessed with Christmas, and so are my kids. We will tear through the more traditional Christmas movies like “Die Hard,” “Gremlins,” “Christmas Vacation,” “Scrooged” we actually just revisited.
We watch a lot of Christmas movies, and especially while we're putting up our decorations, we're watching Christmas movies.
2021 was for many reasons a very, very difficult holiday season for us. It was a difficult year for us as a family. It was a really, really rough holiday season, and we ended up spending Christmas Eve with our neighbors. We are lucky to have, I think, the best neighbors that I can possibly imagine. And we did a sort of round robin, like a progressive Christmas Eve celebration at each of our houses. We spent one hour at each house with a different food, a different drink, a different activity for the kids at each house. And it was over by 9PM so everyone could go home, put their kids to bed and, you know, do what they had to do to get ready for the next day. It was so wonderful.
And we didn't think about it as if, like, “Oh, this is what we'll always do.” But a week ago, the text chain lit up, the group chat lit up, and – I called it the group chain once, and everyone has roasted me, everyone on this team has roasted me ever since for saying group chain – apparently the group chat, the group chat lit up and we're doing it again this year. Will we do it next year? I honestly have no idea. I have no idea. But we are doing it again this year.
I like to say that my only traditions are that we have no traditions, but I think it's more that I just want them to be held loosely. I want them to be held loosely. I want them to always leave space for who and how we are as a family or as individuals in that moment. And I don't ever want to create the kind of environment where people feel obligated, because the minute it's an obligation, it's not a celebration anymore. It's very hard to have a celebration and an obligation together.
So, happyish holidays to all of you. I hope that this holiday season is whatever you need it to be, and if you have anything that you would like to add to this topic or to any other, you can always email us. It's Terrible@feelingsand.co. Our phone number is 612-568-4441. I love voicemails from you all. You heard some of them in this episode.
We are an independent production. If you can rate, review, share this podcast with people, that helps. And if you would like to support this show financially, which is another way to do it, you are certainly not obligated to, you can go to TTFA.org/Premium to get ad-free episodes, bonus content, and other things. Other things. Including, I'm mailing out some holiday gifts for our top-tier subscribers this week.
This has been Happyish Holidays. I am Nora McInerny. This episode was not recorded in my closet. It was not recorded in my office. It was recorded in Marcel Malekebu’s office in Minneapolis. [Marcel: Put your fucking hands in the air!] During nap time. The kids are napping. They say they slept through this whole episode. It's just white noise, literal white noise. [laughs] Marcel, what do you call my podcast? [Marcel Malekebu: White Noise.] That's the spinoff. Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. Our senior producer is Marcel Malekebu. The rest of our team is Jordan Turgeon. Megan Palmer. Claire McInerny. Larissa Witcher. Eugene Kidd. Our theme music is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson. We are a production of Feelings & Co. The shorthand is F and CO, which stands for Farts and Company, and I'll come up with some other funny ones, but that's where we're starting. Okay, bye.