Finding Peace for the Holidays

by Victoria

The holidays are a time for reflection and nostalgia. Yet in the midst of all the shopping and planning, parties and festivities, we often forget that the holidays are about the spiritual part of ourselves. They are about our hearts and souls, about the part we share with others and the part we share with the spiritual being we believe in. The holidays are about finding peace.

Throughout the year, the stress and complications of daily life overwhelm us; we often become distanced from our spiritual selves. Most Americans don’t attend a place of worship regularly; most say they don’t have time. Meanwhile, most queers don’t feel welcome at places of worship, and many others don’t feel that queer groups like Dignity or MCC fulfill their desire to belong to a religious community.

Thus, at the holidays a sense of loss can pervade us, making us feel empty despite the frenetic gloss surrounding us. The holidays, with their emphasis on religion and family, tend to raise these conflicted feelings about our spiritual selves. We often feel pushed out of the most vital part of the season: the comforting sense of belonging that we get from being part of a family and a spiritual community. Even while we are immersed in the hustle and bustle of the season, we can feel excluded. The holidays are often the time when queers feel most marginalized. The holidays become a limbo time, never quite meeting our expectations — not as good as the nostalgic past we remember, not a warm memory in the present.

I have no happy memories of childhood holidays; my childhood was irredeemably awful, my family’s dysfunction a palpable presence that overshadowed everything, ruining every holiday and leaving only painful memories. In theory this should have made my adult Christmases easier to reclaim: no Norman Rockwell images from my past to conflict with my present.

But instead I have been overwhelmed with the desire for the perfect holiday, the best Christmas ever. Not just to make up for what I did not have as a child, but to make some fabulous memories, something to be nostalgic about.

One Christmas about which I feel such nostalgia was my first Christmas away from my family of origin. I was living in New Orleans with two virtual strangers, people I had known only a few months in a city in which I knew no one else. We were all in the domestic Peace Corps and were devoted to creating change. We shared goals, and we shared living on the edge of society.

Perhaps because the three of us were estranged from our families in a city that was not the city of our birth, we felt a deep connection. I know it was the most memorable Christmas of my life. It was a Christmas that had all the sweetness I had always dreamed of; it was so very genuine. None of us had anything — we were living on next to nothing in a cold little house in New Orleans. We shared evenings listening to Handel’s Messiah and drinking eggnog while we made construction-paper chains and strung popcorn (much harder than it looks) and cranberries. We turned our little house into a festive holiday village, wrapped our meager gifts in the Sunday comics and shared something I know I shall never forget. It was indeed the gift of giving.

The essence of that Christmas comes back to me each year, no year more poignantly than this one, because of the terrible disaster that befell New Orleans. All my friends who lived there were displaced; many lost everything they had. The places where I lived were submerged along with 80 percent of the city.

I imagine the 1.3 million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are having bittersweet holidays. Some still have nothing; many are far from their homes. The disaster marginalized so many, all of whom are no doubt feeling excluded this holiday season. After three months, these people are mostly forgotten by those who weren’t touched directly by the disaster; the rest of us have moved on to other tragedies, other victims.

Yet they are not alone in feeling lost. Many of us feel just as lost.

It doesn’t take a priest or rabbi to remind us that the holidays are about more than just things. Nor does it take being inside a church or synagogue to reconnect us with our spirituality.

Think about what has meant most to you over the years at the holiday season. Isn’t it always giving? Doesn’t it remain true that even as we feel lost or excluded or pushed to the very margins of society, we can reclaim our souls simply by giving of ourselves in some meaningful way? Doesn’t giving anchor us? When I remember that Christmas in New Orleans, I am always reminded of the most elemental part of what the holidays should mean: sharing with others.

This season, stop to reflect on what you really want for the holidays. Not things — they won’t leave you with cherished memories. Think about giving of yourself. Think about sitting around with your chosen family and making those silly construction-paper chains or stringing cranberries (much easier than popcorn!). Think about working at a shelter or going to sit with the elderly or the sick. Think about all those people displaced from New Orleans and how blessed you are to have a home. If you can, adopt one of those families and send them gifts.

In a world in which many of us feel alienated from the societies in which we live, it is vital that we keep our hearts open to others, that we remember to give much more than we take. It is easy for us as queers, as outsiders, to feel exclusion overwhelm everything else. But we don’t have to become lost.

I had nothing that Christmas in New Orleans. Yet the memory of what I shared and what was shared with me has warmed me for 25 years. Make giving memories for yourselves this holiday season. That is where you will find what we all yearn for: peace.