Even the most festive among us has to hit holiday burnout at some point. And if you’re trying drum up your holiday spirit and keep coming up empty, you may have hit this point sometime around Halloween.
So this week’s Whiny Wednesday topic is simply:
The Holidays Without Children
Feel free to unleash your inner Grinch…or not.
“Without kids” doesn’t mean I have all the money in the world to spend…
When are they going to get that????
I am frustrated with all the attention placed on children during the holidays and the idea that they somehow make everything better. For example, a meme has been spreading around social media insisting that it’s much more fun to be a parent at Christmas than it was as child. Hurtful.
When my partner was coming home last night, he ran into a lady who lives a few doors down. She asked him “are you all ready for Christmas?” He muttered something about us not really going mad at Christmas time and told her that we don’t put our tree up until the week before Christmas Day. She observed that some people across the road already had their Christmas tree up and even had bright flashing lights in the tree in their garden. “Mind you”, she said “they have grandchildren. Christmas is all about children really.” This lady is about 70 and she and her husband don’t have any children. I don’t know her story but I think she is childless not by choice. It must have been so hard for a lady from that generation when all a woman was expected to do was to have a family, when all her friends were having them and now to face old age, left out again with no grandchildren. I would never dream of saying anything to her about it but I silently sent her kind thoughts and support, and felt sadder about my own future.
I was told by the Lyft driver this week when asked if I have children; “At least you have a career”.
I’m sure he didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t know how to reply, so I just smiled like I always do to those who have no clue what we go through.