Grief During the Holidays: How to Get Through the First Season Without Them

The first holiday season after someone dies arrives whether you are ready for it or not. Stores start playing the music in October. Invitations come. Someone asks what you are doing for Thanksgiving, and you realize you have no idea how to answer, because the honest answer is that you cannot picture the table without them at it.

If you are reading this in September or October, dreading something that is still months away, that dread is not a sign you are grieving wrong. Anticipating a hard day is often as heavy as the day itself. And if the season is already here and you are just trying to get from one week to the next, that is a reasonable way to spend a December.

There is no correct way to do this. But there are things that tend to help, and things families consistently wish someone had told them in advance.

Why the holidays hit differently

Grief is not constant. It moves in waves, and most of the time you have some say in what sets it off. The holidays take that away. The season is built out of exactly the things that carry memory most efficiently — the same songs every year, the same smells from the kitchen, the same ornaments coming out of the same box, the same people in the same room.

There is also the arithmetic of absence. An empty chair is visible in a way that ordinary Tuesdays are not. Traditions are, by definition, things you have always done together, which means every one of them now has a gap in it. Families often describe the holidays as a second loss: not just the person, but the shape of the life you had with them.

And on top of all that sits the pressure to seem fine. Other people are celebrating. There is an unspoken expectation that you will show up and be pleasant. Carrying grief and performing cheer at the same time is exhausting, and it is worth naming that the exhaustion is real rather than assuming you are simply not coping well.

Decide in advance, but decide loosely

The single most common piece of advice from people who have been through a first holiday season is this: make a plan, and then hold it loosely.

Not planning leaves you improvising in the moment, when you have the least capacity for it. Planning too rigidly sets you up to feel like you failed when the day goes sideways. Somewhere in between is a short list of decisions made while you are relatively calm.

Useful things to decide early:

• Where you will be. Your own house, someone else's, or somewhere entirely new. Many families find that changing the location takes a surprising amount of pressure off, because a different room does not come with the same memories built into it.
• Who will be there. A smaller gathering is not a lesser one. It is fine to have a quiet meal with two people this year.
• Which traditions you are keeping. Not all of them. Pick the ones that feel like comfort and let the others rest for a year. They will still be there if you want them back.
• How you will leave. Drive yourself. Decide in advance that you can go home early without explaining. Having an exit makes it far easier to stay.

Tell one person your plan — the one who will run interference if someone asks a question you do not want to answer.

Make room for them on purpose

Families sometimes try to get through the day by not mentioning the person at all, hoping to avoid setting anyone off. It rarely works. The absence is in the room regardless, and the silence around it tends to make everyone more tense, not less.

Deliberately making space for them usually goes better. A few ways families do this:

• Light a candle at the start of the meal and simply say their name. No speech required.
• Cook one dish that was theirs — the stuffing they always made, the pie only they knew how to get right.
• Hang an ornament for them, or put their stocking up anyway.
• Go around the table and have everyone share one memory. This works especially well with children, who often have wonderful small memories no one else knows about.
• Set a place for them, if that comforts rather than hurts. Some families find this tender; others find it unbearable. You know which one you are.
• Play their music. A favorite album in the kitchen while you cook can change the whole temperature of a house.

Do one of these, not all of them. The goal is to acknowledge the person, not to build a ceremony you then have to manage.

Let the traditions change

There is a quiet fear underneath a lot of holiday grief: that if you stop doing things the way you always did, you are letting the person go. That is not how it works. Traditions are containers for love, and when the shape of a family changes, the containers change too. That is not disloyalty.

Some families move Christmas dinner to Christmas Eve. Some go out for breakfast instead of cooking. Some travel, or volunteer, or spend the day doing something the person would have found completely absurd, and find that it helps. Starting something new does not erase the old thing. It just gives you somewhere to stand this year.

Expect the season, not just the day

People brace for December 25th and are caught off guard by everything around it. The first time a carol comes on in the car. Addressing cards and stopping at their name. The shopping trip where you reach for a gift out of habit. New Year's Eve, which can be the hardest of all, because it means entering a year they were never alive in.

Knowing the ambushes are coming does not prevent them, but it does make them less frightening. When one lands, it helps to have somewhere to put it — a walk, a phone call to the one person who does not need you to explain, five minutes in the car in a parking lot. None of that is avoidance. It is pacing.

Give people something to do

The people around you want to help and mostly do not know how, so they hover or they stay away. Both feel bad from where you are sitting.

If you have the energy, be specific. Ask someone to handle the cooking. Ask someone to be the one who says the person's name first, so you do not have to. Ask someone to call you on the 26th, when the house is quiet and everyone has gone home — the days after are often harder than the day itself and almost nobody thinks to check in then.

If someone asks how you are and you do not want to answer, "it is a hard month" is a complete sentence.

And if you cannot do any of it

Some years, the plan is to get through. You order food. You skip the party. You watch something undemanding and go to bed early. You do not decorate. That is not giving up on the holidays; it is recognizing what you have capacity for this particular December.

Grief is not a test you can fail. A hard season does not mean you are stuck, and a good day in the middle of it does not mean you have forgotten them. Both are just what this looks like.

Some families find that the holidays are when they want something to hold onto — something that says out loud who the person was. That might be a photo book, a letter written to them and kept in a drawer, or a song. At Their Life Song we write custom memorial songs from the details families share with us: the sayings, the habits, the small particular things that made them who they were. Some families play theirs at the table on the first Christmas. Others just keep it for the quiet moments. Either way, it gives the love somewhere to go.

However you get through this season, getting through it is enough.

Related reading

• Ways to Remember Someone on Their Birthday After They've Passed
• How to Support a Grieving Friend
• Custom Memorial Songs: The Complete Guide