The stocking that shouldn't be there but is. The recipe you can't bring yourself to make. The song that ambushes you in the cereal aisle and leaves you gripping your cart like it's the only thing keeping you upright.
If you're navigating this season with a hole where someone used to be, let me say it plainly:
you are not broken because this is hard.
Grief Doesn't Follow the Calendar
We live in a culture that wants grief to have an expiration date. Six months, maybe a year if it was really significant. Then you're supposed to be "better." Ready to participate fully in joy again, no lingering sadness allowed.
But grief isn't linear. It doesn't care that it's the most wonderful time of the year. It shows up uninvited, sits down at your holiday table, and refuses to leave just because everyone else is singing carols.
And here's what no one warns you about: some years are harder than the one before. You think you've found your footing, that you've learned how to do holidays without them, and then this Christmas arrives and it's somehow worse than last year. That's not regression. That's not "going backward." That's just how grief works—it doesn't follow a predictable path or get consistently lighter with time.
Some days you're fine. Some days you're holding it together with dental floss and sheer determination. Some days you do both before breakfast.
All of it is valid.
The Truth About Joy and Sorrow
Here's what they don't tell you: you can hold both at the same time.
You can feel grateful for the people gathered around you and simultaneously ache for the one who isn't. You can laugh at your niece's terrible joke and then retreat to the bathroom to cry five minutes later. You can love the traditions and also feel crushed by them.
This isn't contradiction. It's wholeness.
It's what it means to be human—to carry love so deep that its absence creates its own kind of gravity.
What the Season Actually Asks of You
Nothing.
Christmas asks nothing of you except to show up as you are.
Not the polished version. Not the "I'm fine, really" version you trot out for concerned relatives. The actual you—the one who's tired, the one who's still figuring out how to exist in a world where they aren't, the one who ate cookies for dinner because cooking felt impossible.
That version is welcome here.
The sacred doesn't require your performance. It never has. The first Christmas itself was a mess - Joseph and Mary far from home and family, scrambling to find shelter, giving birth in a barn surrounded by animals and chaos. No one had it figured out. No one was doing it "right." They were exhausted, displaced, and making it work with what they had.
Divinity entered through that mess, not despite it.
They were just doing it. And so are you.
Permission to Protect Your Peace
You don't have to attend every gathering. You don't have to explain why certain things are too much this year. You don't have to force cheer or fake enthusiasm or pretend the hole isn't there.
You can say no. You can leave early. You can change traditions or abandon them entirely.
You can also keep the ones that feel like lifelines, even if they hurt. Even if everyone else thinks it would be "easier" if you just let them go.
This is your grief. You get to decide how to carry it.
The Unexpected Moments
And you know the weird, uncomfortable truth: sometimes, in the middle of the heaviness, joy will sneak up on you.
A memory that makes you laugh instead of cry. A moment of connection that doesn't feel like obligation. A sudden, surprising sense of them being near - not in a haunting way, but in a way that feels like love persisting beyond what should be possible.
These moments don't mean you're "over it." They don't mean you're betraying their memory by feeling something other than sadness.
They mean love is still alive in you. Still doing its work. Still insisting on its own existence, even in the spaces where loss lives.
You Don't Have to Do This Perfectly
There is no correct way to grieve during the holidays. No rubric. No scorecard. No invisible judge tallying up whether you're handling it with grace.
All you have to do is breathe. Show up. Feel what you feel without apologizing for it.
If that means crying through Christmas dinner, so be it. If that means skipping it entirely and watching old movies in your pajamas, equally valid. If that means doing everything exactly as you always have because routine is the only thing keeping you steady right now - that's okay too.
You are allowed to survive this season however you need to.
The Space I Hold
At EMBody Wisdom, I understand that the holidays can illuminate everything you're carrying - the love, the loss, the unbearable weight of both existing simultaneously.
I hold space for you in the messy middle, the uncomfortable in-between where grief and gratitude coexist. Where you don't have to explain yourself or apologize for not being "over it yet."
This isn't about fixing you or making the pain go away. It's about being present in it with you- so you don't have to navigate the hard parts alone.
If you need support this season - or any season - reach out.
Because here's what I know: the fact that it still hurts means the love was real.
And that love? It doesn't end just because they're not physically here.
It transforms. It persists. It shows up in unexpected moments and reminds you that connection doesn't require presence.
It just requires truth.
So be truthful this season. With yourself. With your grief. With your moments of unexpected joy.
That's not failing at the holidays.
That's living fully in them.
When Life unravels...
know that you're not alone.
EMBody Wisdom holds space for you in the messy middle - the uncomfortable in-between
as you come Home... to Yourself.
