When Christmas Stops Feeling Like Home
On family roles, guilt, and choosing a different way of belonging
1. Christmas as a Mirror, Not a Destination
Christmas is not hard because you’re broken. For some of us, Christmas doesn’t feel like home. It feels like a stage. A repetition. A performance we know by heart but no longer believe in. Like getting a ticket to a movie you don’t want to see, but are expected to sit through anyway.
And that’s the point. Holidays don’t create family wounds. They just reveal them. They place a massive spotlight on dynamics that usually remain hidden under routine, distance, or silence. So when Christmas hurts, it’s rarely about the day itself. It’s about the cost of playing a role you’ve already outgrown.
Some of us aren’t sad at Christmas because we’re lonely. We’re sad because we’ve been betraying ourselves to keep the show rolling.
2. When Family Becomes a Performance
In some families, harmony is maintained by silence. And the one who speaks becomes the disturbance.
However, when a so-called safe space is only safe if you don’t express, don’t question, don’t name what’s happening, then safety is conditional. Expression is punished and silence is rewarded. Talking becomes confrontation. Honesty becomes aggression, and we end up relating from our own shadows and reacting instead of relating consciously with empathy. When this happens, it becomes easier for the “problem” to slowly shift from the dynamic itself to the person who dares to name it.
This is how roles are formed through these dynamics that we never dare to question. The peacekeeper, the avoider, the one who breaks the illusion by naming what everyone else is invested in not seeing. If and when anyone dares to speak, they “ruin the mood.” But this is exactly the mechanics of a system built on silence and guilt. It keeps everything looking “fine” on the surface, at the cost of your own inner coherence, while you keep smiling for the pictures. Does it sound familiar? To me, this is a macro pattern replicated in everyday, intimate spaces.
Christmas hurts because it awakens those feelings that you try so hard to push down throughout the year, and suddenly those emotions and your body ask you to step back from a role you’ve already outgrown.
3. Love, Endurance, and the Cost of Staying
But if this is the case, why do we keep trying to play the role? Why do we keep trying to be accepted in this “cult” of Merry Christmas? Well, the answer will sting like a paper cut. Many of us were taught that love was pain, surprise, surprise! And therefore, that love meant staying, self-abandonment in exchange for acceptance. So you keep coming back to that Christmas dinner hoping that it doesn't go so wrong this year, but you still prepare yourself for war.
You were taught, subtly or explicitly, that to be loved you had to endure. To adapt. To carry what others refused to look at. And if you dared to think differently, guilt would arrive heavy and immediate. In this emotional brew, leaving came to mean betrayal. Who do you think you are, wanting something else? Who do you think you are to believe you deserve different dynamics? So you betray yourself to keep the peace. And when the cost shows up as sadness, depression, exhaustion, you’re pointed at again. Therapy becomes proof that you are “the issue”. Sensitivity becomes weakness. Awareness becomes arrogance. Love becomes endurance at self-cost.
But I will say it out loud: This is not love. It was never love. This was purely conditioning and lack of emotional accountability, a lack of awareness.
4. The Loneliness of Outgrowing a Role
Being the one who sees the pattern doesn’t make you free. It often makes you lonely. You spend years, money, energy, and emotional resources trying to understand the why. Trying to understand yourself, to heal. Meanwhile, the system you come from stays exactly the same and quietly resists your change.
Christmas then acts like a final test. Join us. Pretend. Or feel excluded. Music playing in the background: “Willkommen, bienvenue…” It shouldn’t be black and white, and yet you’re constantly pushed into an impossible middle ground. Your very existence starts to feel like a threat. No matter how much inner work you do, you’re still framed as “the issue” for not fitting in. The narrative is manipulated so accountability never lands. You’re accused of being stuck in the past. Of being ill, unstable. Your “visible unhappiness” is used as evidence against you. And sometimes it’s even reframed as: you’re just too intelligent, that’s why we don’t understand you. Not because there is rejection. Not because there is avoidance. And definitely, not because accountability is unbearable.
But remember, Christmas doesn’t create this. It simply exposes it. At some point, something shifts internally. You realize you are no longer trying to escape pain. You are organizing meaning.
5. Stepping Out Without Burning Bridges
Choosing to step out of a role is not cruelty. It is self-protection. You can be the one who changes the pattern and protects yourself. You can stop performing without declaring war and you can love from a distance, if you choose to. Leaving a role doesn’t destroy the system. It reveals it. Someone else will eventually be asked to carry what you no longer hold. This is where the edge appears. The cliff. If I stop performing, what’s left? If I don’t force myself to belong, will I be alone? And maybe new questions arise. So what if I want to spend Christmas on my own in, let’s say, Rome? So what if I start the year in Southeast Asia? So what if the way I choose to live no longer matches the script I was handed?
Sometimes what is called “love” is actually control. “I worry about you” becomes a justification to limit your freedom. “I know what’s best for you” becomes a way of holding your passport, not trusting your soul.
The way you see love determines how you see yourself. And how you relate to and love others. And all you might have at first is a quiet inner knowing. No substantial proof, no guarantees. Just your soul insisting, again and again, that another way of relating is possible, and that all that self-analysis has led you to this exact point in time.
So you choose to stop performing. Not as rebellion. As honesty.
6. Reimagining Christmas (Without Forcing Connection)
I’m not forcing any connection this year. I’m planting a seed. The chosen family is not built overnight. It’s built slowly. Through recognition, not explanation. Through ease, not endurance.
But believe me when I say, there are people you don’t need to justify yourself to in order to be embraced. With them, connection feels less like meeting and more like remembering. Communication is natural. Uncomfortable conversations are a must and not avoided. Kindness is simple. There are no tricks. No guilt. No pointing fingers.
You don’t need to convene people. You need to name a truth and open a horizon. We need to stop forcing people to celebrate Christmas the way we were told Christmas should look. Some people feel deep pressure simply for not being physically close to family. Others feel pressure to return to spaces that hurt.
But real family is not about dates on a calendar. It’s the people who show up on a random Tuesday when you’re not okay, and who celebrate your wins even more than you do yourself. The ones who offer time, space, and presence because you matter every day, not just on holidays.
That is the kind of human connection I want to build my life around.
7. Letting the Inner Child Be Seen
However, changing relational patterns often brings grief with it, especially for the part of us that still hopes to be seen by the family we came from. And that hope makes sense. She just wants to be seen. And it’s okay to understand her, to hold her gently. But at some point, something matures. You realize you no longer need the family you were born into to recognize her. Because there are so many people in the world who will, starting with yourself. With or without Christmas. But always without pretending.
So, if Christmas hurts, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. You’re simply outgrowing a role that was subtly imposed on you. You’re always allowed to choose differently. Not overnight. Not alone. Not in performance.
That is the family I am. And that is the family I want to create.
If this resonates, you’re not alone. And maybe, slowly, honestly, over time, we will get to know each other.
With love always,
Maria Luisa
PS: Tomorrow I’ll be sharing something related to this on my Instagram posts. The masks we needed to survive. Christmas Special. Not to judge them, but to understand why we needed them in the first place.
If this reflection resonated, you are welcome to join my newsletter.
I share writings, insights and gentle reminders to support your own Spiral Way.
