Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
Isolation and Togetherness: A Case for Not Forcing the Holidays
Karen Johnson Gustafson
Three o'clock P.M. Christmas Eve Day 1986...a lifetime ago...images filed away under "S" for "Surely Somebody Else's Life". An already forty-year old single mother of three children ages eleven, ten and eight.. A newly ordained Unitarian Universalist minister in her first year of ministry facing the winter holiday season NEEDING for this to be the best Christmas ever. Fifty or sixty new people with expectations and hopes resting in her care.
The college students who have shared her home and who have been invaluable support with child care during her often erratic schedule, are long gone to celebrate in other places with their other families. The children have been patient and helpful to the limits of their tolerance; children in the throes of their own expectations and hopes; children whose father is in the middle of a five month adventure spending THIS Christmas on a sheep farm in New Zealand; children who are at best ambivalent about this first Christmas Eve in a new place needing to get dressed up to go to church.
I am grateful for what these children do not remember about this Christmas Eve Day. That they do not remember the frustration erupting into loud voices and threats and probably later even bribes. I am grateful that they did not hear me sobbing in the bathroom saying "How can I go to church and speak of joy and peace on earth when I can't even have it in my own home?"
What they remember is that we had clam chowder after church at home with their aunt Ah-li and cousin Brie and that we all got up at four o'clock on Christmas morning, cleaned up the house, packed the car and went over the river and through the woods to grandmothers' house and Sarah got an eight foot pink plush snake...
I share this story because it reminds me that the challenges of isolation and togetherness that so many of us experience at this time of the year do not spring full grown out of Santa's beard but are with us through out the rest of the year. This is a story about the elements of isolation which have little or nothing to do with being alone. It's about expectations, both real and imagined, fueled by togetherness. It's about the effects of taking on more than one can bear. It's about wanting congruence between what we say we believe in and what we do. It's about grace and about how a foundation of love and goodness can transcend crabbiness and good memories can eclipse bad if we let them.
We all experience these issues at one time or another throughout the year, a month a week, a day. Navigating the waters of relationship with self and others is probably the single most challenging aspect of human life. Engaging with others in ways that are life giving and satisfying reflections of our own values, generates what some theologians refer to as divine energy. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, refers to the "I thou" relationship; Henry Nelson Weiman a Unitarian, speaks of creative interchange. Gestault psychologists refer to "the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
Day by day in every way this is, I think, what consciously or unconsciously, we want. To live comfortably in our own skin, to have peace with our neighbors and families, to find a balance between solitude and interaction with others that fits our personal style, to be present to our experiences, to be taken seriously for what we value and believe and to experience laughter and joy and pleasure in the company we share. To choose and to be chosen by those whom we like and who we hope will like us.
Throughout our lives, for better and for worse, we establish our own styles of relating, habits of heart and means of connection. In our day to day lives, we learn strategies for engaging with others with whom we work and with whom we live - either intimately or by association. Happy or not happy, our lives run on familiarity if not always routine. Familiarity has the feel of control and we operate comfortably within a range of possible disturbance. We base whether we are having a good day or a bad day on the degree to which what happens to us falls within our comfort zone of predictability and surprise, positive and negative encounters with others; the degree to which what happens to us and what we make happen results in feeling of competence and safety; the degree to which our expectations for better or worse are met. Within the normal course of days each of us constructs a reality which we have the luxury of occupying.
And then something extraordinary happen. The culture in which we live gives us the winter holiday season. We get this season as an annual test, a screen test in which our relationship life is writ large and projected out of proportion. The boundaries within which our lives are safe and predictable are assaulted by expectations not of our making. The challenges as well as the gifts of togetherness that we experience the rest of the year are concentrated by cultural edict and illuminated by the light of cultural mythology.
1. Myth one: No one should be alone on Christmas. No one should want to be alone on Christmas. If you are alone on Christmas you must be unhappy about it. So embedded is this myth in our culture that people who do not like each other very much and in fact do not choose to be together at any other time, who are not Christians, who cannot afford to buy gifts, who are already overextended emotionally and financially, get together and go to church and exchange gifts and eat too much and spend the rest of the year feeling resentful and thinking up ways to avoid doing it again even if they know they will because the thought of being alone for Christmas is unthinkable. Imagine being stopped in the grocery store on December 28 by a neighbor who says, "How was your Christmas?" replying. "Christmas, that was Wednesday, right. Let's see. I warmed up some lasagna, read a book on Mayan culture and admired the lights on your front lawn. It was fine." "Yah, right." Your neighbor says in his head. Aloud he says, "Why, if we'd known you were alone you could have come to our house. All our crazy relatives were there. They all went home yesterday. Thank god. Well, we'll remember you next year and get you over for Christmas. This is an illustration of
Myth 2 which is: Being with ANYBODY is better than being alone.
Myth 3 - If I can't be with my own family I'd rather be alone no matter how hard it is.
Do I think human beings in this culture can overcome the power of the myth? I don't know. What I do know is that there are some things that can help.
First of all I think it is important to understand the challenges of isolation and togetherness that are so apparent during the holiday season can be magnifications of those same challenges that may plague us the rest of the year.
Some years ago I came up with a model for negotiating the holiday season. It has been at least six or seven years since I presented it and someone just the other day mentioned it to me and said that she still used it to help her and her family to approach Christmas. It would bear repeating, she said. So here it is.
The kind of holiday one will have is the direct result of the relationship between resources and expectations.
By resources I mean time and money and energy and mental and physical health. Expectations are expectations, but may vaty wildly among members of the same family.
In simple terms, a combination of high resources and high expectations is what makes a perfect holiday (maybe a perfect anything)
A combination of low expectations and high resources can make for an unusual holiday (a holiday in some exotic place, with strangers, with no gifts or spent in offering dinner for homeless people in a shelter)
A combination of low expectations and low resources can either be a very simple celebration or no celebration at all.
The thing we all fear most is high expectations and low resources which can make for disappointment or over extension or exhaustion and anxiety, debt and regret. More often than not this phenomenon is driven by cultural myth that denies the reality of resources and expectations.
Perhaps then, the key to a sane holiday season lies in a careful assessment and negotiation of resources and expectations far enough ahead of the inevitable juggernaut of cultural pressure that happens each year. Start soon to get out onto the table your own real expectations and the real expectations of your loved ones and to assess the resources available to meet them. They may be more in line than you thing. And if it is isolation you want, take it. If it togetherness you want, find it. December 26th is too late!
Best wishes for the time ahead!