I spend Christmas Day alone and it's one of my favourite days of the year
What's my secret? I don't care what anyone else thinks.
Up until my very early thirties, I would spend Christmas with my family or with a boyfriend. It was rare for me to have a Christmas that I truly enjoyed, though there were definitely aspects of some of them that were nice. A shift came in my early thirties when I spent Christmas with friends for the first time. Taking the traditional family Christmas off the table felt liberating, and after a couple of years celebrating “Friendsmas” I knew I wanted to spend Christmas Day alone for the first time.
As with anything that’s vaguely out of the ordinary, telling friends was an interesting experience and their responses ranged from one person saying that they couldn’t believe I’d rather spend Christmas alone than spend it with them (which somehow entirely missed the point while somehow also making it), a few people offering me a place at their Christmas table (very kind, but unnecessary) and a lot of people looked at me with deep sadness in their eyes while saying something like, “Well, if you do it once then at least you’ll know that you never want to do it again.”
That was almost ten years ago, and I still feel that spending Christmas Day alone is the best Christmas gift I can give myself. I’m not fully rigid in this - I’ve had two Christmases where people have joined me because they know how I spend the day and, for that year at least, for whatever reason, they’ve craved that too - but, on the whole, I know what I like and I stick to it.
And what I like is a fairly structured day. I like for Christmas Day to not feel like any old day - I want it to feel like Christmas Day! So I buy myself a couple of presents and some nice food for the day, I make the effort to wear something that isn’t pyjamas or joggers (certainly not the case every day), I listen to The Snowman and the Home Alone soundtrack on vinyl and play my Christmas playlists, I cook a big roast dinner (chicken, not turkey, and ALL the trimmings), I watch Die Hard and Little Lord Fauntleroy (the Ricky Schroder/Alec Guiness version), I eat cheese and crackers and Celebrations and Quality Street. I talk to loved ones. I rest. And it’s a Good Day.
It’s not always a wholly good day. Last year I had the flu. Another year I had a migraine. I still cooked myself Christmas dinner, and I think that indicates how important some of these traditional touchpoints are to me - how they help Christmas Day feel special to me. But, overall the hit rate is pretty high, to be honest, and I feel like my personal Christmas is a tradition that’s worth upholding. I see family and friends for short bursts during the Christmas period, but Christmas Day is always reserved for me and doing this tends to fill me with a deep sense of gratitude and joy.
However you spend Christmas, if you celebrate it, I hope you can get what you want from the day. For some of us, that’s not always easy - or even possible - at first. And when there is a lot of expectation and tradition in the mix, doing what’s right for us can sometimes (read: often) mean disappointing others, especially if they’re unwilling to see past their own defensiveness/insecurities to recognise what you’re doing. But I do think that if we are a bit more honest about how we want to spend our time - how we want to feel on the day - and have the courage to voice that and follow through with it, then we’re more likely to have a Christmas Day that we’re going to really enjoy. And that can feel like a Christmas miracle.