By Sarah Wells
In my experience, it’s a common theme for women to get depressed around their birthdays. I was talking to a few of my friends the other day about it, and one said that she’s cried every single year over her cake. Even when she was a baby and had no concept of time or aging, she would still let out a wail that echoed throughout her home state of New Jersey. While my other friends empathized with her melancholic viewpoints on aging, I wondered why I didn’t feel the same way.
I mean, I get it. Aging sucks, especially when you’re a woman. Birthdays go from an exciting rite of passage to an unfortunate reminder that you’re losing any value you once had as a healthy, fertile, young woman—at least, that’s how it feels in our society.. Menopause is a lingering threat that us young ladies are taught to fear since childhood, like some sort of goblin waiting under our beds—one that waits until we’re sleeping to dry up our ovaries and make us have heat flashes in elevators. My grandmother told me she had a crisis on her 25th birthday, one where she’d stopped sleeping completely so she had more time in a day. At the same age, my mom told me that she spent the whole day crying in her room instead of celebrating.
I do not get sad on my birthday. As someone who likes attention, a whole day based solely on me is not one I tend to scoff at.
During the holidays, however? Call my tear ducts Niagara Falls. There’s just something about Christmas that brings a certain nostalgic (yet incredibly, incredibly depressing) tear to my eye.
There’s nothing particularly special about Christmas in my life. It played no major role in my childhood, so I’m not sure why it has so much impact on my emotional state as an adult. I had the life a lot of kids my age had: divorced parents, too much sugar, and a particular affinity for television. Like many children of divorce, I had to grow up remarkably fast. I guess this is what happens when you’re forced to go to family court–I spent so much time in front of a judge that I probably could have been considered our lawyer’s very young apprentice. Who knows? Maybe I could be the next Sandra Day O’Connor if this whole writing thing doesn’t work out.
The divorce made Christmas messy at times. My father’s family, being uber religious, hated any commercial aspect of Christmas. Santa may have well been spelled Satan, as far as they were concerned. My grandmother made my father tell me that Santa wasn’t real when I was six, and after I went home sobbing to my mother, she made him tell me that he was kidding. I never questioned it again until I was eleven, when I asked my Mom, “Why do you and Santa have the same handwriting?”
Now, she writes in cursive for my younger siblings.
I was walking around campus a few weeks ago, the usual holiday sadness setting in. I thought about the divorce, the holidays, and the fact that I had to spend Christmas at two separate houses while my friends got to spend a cozy day with both of their parents together. While I don’t think this is the main reason I get depressed during Christmas time, I think it may play a part.
I’m getting ahead of myself by making it seem like Christmas was all bad when I was a kid. I’m a strict believer that nothing is ever all bad. I mean more inconsequential things, not poverty or world hunger. Those things are pretty bad. Let me make it clear: despite everything—the sadness and the bleak memories—I love the holidays. I love Christmas trees, I love presents, I love snow, and most importantly, I love Christmas movies. This year, I made a Christmas movie calendar with something for every day of December. I don’t mess around.
One of my favorite holiday movies as a kid was Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I loved this movie. Every time I went to the airport as a kid, I always wondered if I could secretly sneak onto the direct flight to JFK airport without a boarding pass, just like Kevin did. Looking back now, it’s definitely a good thing I did not do this. I was not resourceful, and I was an extremely guilty child. Instead of tricking the front desk concierge at The Plaza hotel, I probably would have sobbed so hard that they had to call an ambulance.
The closest I got to this very unattainable dream of exploring New York City alone as an eight year old was when my mom brought me and my brother to the city during December. This was my first time in New York ever, and it was also one of my favorites. I’m not sure if it was the sort of childlike wonder that makes New York City even more beautiful when you’re a child (you’ve been shielded from the sad truth of how dirty and tragic it can be at times), or the fact that I was exhausted from the overnight bus ride, but it felt like I was walking on some sort of whimsical, peppermint flavored cloud all day. We saw the Rockettes, walked on Fifth Avenue, visited the top of the Empire State building… all of the quintessential New York City tourist activities. And I ate up every minute of it.
It just felt Christmas-y, like all of the movies and songs that I had heard up to that point. I still look back on it as one of my fondest Christmases, because I imagine that the feeling I got from the holiday that year is the one that other kids got every year.
Personally, I feel like there’s all different types of nostalgia. There’s nostalgia for things we’ve actually experienced, then there’s nostalgia for things we wished we had experienced. I’m sure I’m not the only kid with divorced parents that gets nostalgic over the pure thought of having one whole Christmas, like the kind we’ve seen in movies, TV, or the occasional Honda commercial. It’s a sort of weird longing, not to necessarily have a different family, but just to have a better version of the one you already do have. For example, instead of Dad pulling over to take a rip from a bong while his eight-year-old daughter is in the car, maybe he’s (soberly) asking the family if they want to go sledding after getting the Christmas tree. Instead of driving to family court, maybe we’re driving to Grandma’s to make cookies (in this case, she would not be trying to spill the Santa-related beans).
I think that I get real nostalgia over this trip to New York. The reason I liked it so much is because I got to be a different kid. I got to feel like Kevin in Home Alone 2, a kid whose Christmases were filled with some sort of joyous whimsy rather than hate-fueled custody battles.
While my friends get emotional over their birthday and the prospect of aging away from the childhoods that brought them so much joy, I think I get emotional over the holidays because I’m mourning the same childhood that I never got to experience. Either way, I’d love to go back to New York for Christmas someday.
Sarah Wells (she/her) ‘26 is a writing and rhetoric major from Syracuse, New York. Sarah is head writer for Live From Studio B! on the Orange Television Network, and also a humor columnist for The Daily Orange. In her spare time, she loves to read, watch movies, and ask people on the street if she can pet their dog.
