Christmas Resilience

YPRL Staff

16 December, 2024

Written by Kate Middleton

At Christmas we are surrounded by jollity: Santas and snowflakes appear all over the place, and carols pipe through shopping centres. For those who love the Christmas spirit, this can be a magical time; for others, it can feel tough to escape. You’ve heard it before: the holidays can be hard for some people. If you are one of those people, it can be a good time to visit the library. Our shelves hold many works that will help you develop coping strategies and to feel less alone.  

Large gatherings are often the occasion for alcohol to flow. For anyone who struggles with alcohol, this can make attendance—whether it’s at the work Christmas party or the family Christmas lunch—hard to face. The pressures to fit in and the temptations of alcohol make for a difficult social experience. Being prepared before going into those situations can help: find strategies and understand your own motives better. 

Christmas celebrations often focus on food. For anyone with a disordered relationship with eating, that makes the event of Christmas lunch or dinner difficult. For families of those with eating disorders, it is also a challenge knowing how to best support their loved ones during a period when feast is the order of the day. Disordered eating comes in many guises, and approaching the subject with compassion is a good starting point. 

The holidays can be a time when loss comes into focus: all the immediate demands associated with losing a loved one are difficult enough to deal with. Facing a holiday with a newly notable absence can be disorienting. Grieving is a process that happens at a different pace for each person, but milestones like Christmas become a prism that concentrates the feeling of loss.  

For anyone who suffers from depression and associated mood disorders, a sense of exhaustion and dread can become too familiar. Stress can be an instigator of a paralysing low mood, and the holidays can become, simply, lost time. Much has been done in recent years to destigmatise mental illness, but it can still be difficult to experience a mood drop or the shiver of anxiety as you go to face the festivities. Philip Gold, a doctor with the US National Institute of Mental Health, has been studying the illness for decades. A book might not solve your problems, but it may also offer you greater insight and recognition—hope, even. 

Sometimes what helps is simply knowing that other people experience the same sense of loneliness and isolation as you do. When in the grip of alienation, it can be hard to comprehend that your feelings are understandable—even common. Allowing yourself space to admit to loneliness and to invite the experiences of others in can be reassuring.  

In recent years, the vocabulary associated with narcissistic abuse—e.g. gaslighting, love bombing—has become better known. At the same time, unless someone has experienced this kind of emotional abuse it is difficult for other people to comprehend what you’ve been through. That’s where works by experts can be useful: seeing your own experiences clearly delineated can help you feel less alone (important during a season associated as much with loneliness as with family) and can also offer ideas for coping with the experience. 

Pure Escape 

An escapist read might also help you leave your preoccupations behind: if you’ve already read all the books that give you the clues on coping with your situation, allow yourself something that will fire the imagination instead. Forget the guilt of a guilty pleasure read: allow yourself to just enjoy the ride. Check out Book Express for the latest splashy stories or take yourself deeper into the collection for a book you’ve been meaning to catch up on. Whatever your idea of a thrilling read is, indulge it. Take yourself and a book on a picnic, to the park, or to sit by the pool and fall into the deep end of a good story. 

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