Holiday Blues: When It Just Doesn’t Feel Festive

Because let’s be honest, some of us just don’t feel the holiday spirit even when among family and friends. Welcome to having holiday blues!

Not all of us feel the festive spirit. Some of us have the holiday blues. As the year closes, we look back at the many things that happened. A lot of loss, a few victories here and there, and probably way too many milestones we didn’t have time to process. Either way, many of us may find ourselves sitting on a couch or lying on the bed scrolling and wondering, “What now? What’s next? And why can’t I find the energy to get up?”

But the thing is, we do so anyway—the mood of our family’s Christmas rests squarely on our shoulders.

Holiday Blues Is Not About Being Scrooge

Christmas lights glare instead of sparkling. The list of inaanaks, colleagues, friends, and family members to give appears longer than last year. Tinsel dangles from the wall frames. A half-finished Christmas menu with no people assigned screams on a messy kitchen counter. Nobody likes dealing with those.

That’s assuming we’re stay-at-home parents. Working parents have requirements to cram as the accounting books close for the year. There’s also fighting the desire to just use all their mandated employee leaves because the last eleven months have finally taken their toll, and not all convert leaves to cash.

Christmas parties are in full swing. So is the holiday traffic. Even if we selectively choose which ones to attend, we smile and shove the metaphorical horseshoe when we have to. After all, nobody wants to be a killjoy. Plus, we probably RSVPed two weeks before, so backing out can feel embarrassing.

But that’s the holiday blues for you. It’s different from Scrooge, who hated Christmas due to being abandoned in a boarding school for the holidays. It’s more of, we don’t have the energy to ride the waves of being festive.

In our heads, many of us are just saying, “Let’s just get this over with.”

Not Every Christmas Has To Be Loud

As we sit in front of the Christmas tree that will just end up in the cabinet by January, maybe the holiday blues are telling us that we already have all the merry-making we need. We find it in the little human tornadoes who fill the house with cheer instead of turning every room into a warzone. We can find it in our partners who willingly wear that tacky Christmas sweater, even if the reluctance and cringe are written all over their faces. Or the best kind: snuggled up in a fleece blanket with a cuppa of our choice, with some of our favorite music playing at a white noise volume.

So for the moms and dads feeling the holiday blues, it’s okay to feel this way. There’s no shame in having a quiet Christmas.

More about the holidays?

Holiday Treats All Around: For Teens
The Modern Parenting Guide to Surviving Holiday Traffic with Kids
PHOTOS: 2025 Christmas Displays Worth Visiting Within The Metro