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YahooGranted, I'm not Christian and therefore, my Christmas is generally a stress-free day of volunteer work and movies, but this is how I perceive Christmas must feel for those experiencing infertility or loss.
Imagine there is a holiday called the Great Peanut Celebration. People get together to celebrate the peanut, serving peanut butter cookies and peanut ale. There are other foods on the table as well, but peanuts are the prominent ingredient because it is, after all, the Great Peanut Celebration! Every store is decorated with little sparkle lights shaped like peanuts and everywhere you go, people call out: "Have a Peanuty Day!" There are performances celebrating the peanut and commercials reminding you to eat peanuts and constant newspaper articles about peanuts. After you attend the GPC party at your office, you have to go spend the day with family and friends opening presents while munching on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Oh...and you're allergic to peanuts.
But don't worry because there will also be plain jelly sandwiches on the table. Though it really sucks that you can't eat peanuts. Of course, we'll all ask you if you've tried some newfangled epi-pen that we read about in some magazine and we'll lament how you can't eat peanuts and we'll rub your arm and tell you, "I hope you get to eat peanuts next year because peanuts taste so good."
And that's what I imagine Christmas is like for those experiencing infertility or loss.
Peanut allergies can be life-threatening whereas infertility is life-style threatening, so it isn't the perfect analogy, but I can't imagine another holiday other than Mother's Day and Father's Day which is more child-focused. The entire holiday is about a child--a newborn baby--and everyone going to see this newborn baby. At least at Easter, Christ is a man. But at Christmas, he's that perfect newborn being celebrated by his parents and community.
There are non-child-focused ways to celebrate Christmas--making out under the mistletoe would be a bit risque for the average school child--but at its core, the holiday is about a baby and the traditions are about family. Getting through the average day with all of the inadvertent reminders of what you don't have--seeing pregnant bellies while you wait in line, navigating the baby aisles at the food store, or driving behind a car with the "baby on board" bumper sticker--seems like nothing when you drop onto the normal load the weight of all the hopes and dreams people have wrapped up in holidays.
The options are either to leave the traditional celebrations behind--opting to go away on vacation or hunker down in your own home--or take a deep breath and continue with plans as normal. I was talking with a friend this weekend and she lamented that since Christmas had always been her favourite holiday, something she looked forward to all year, it was doubly painful to skip it; to not put up the tree or listen to the music or join in the happiness she always felt prior to learning about her infertility. "You only get so many Christmases in life and I'm wasting them," she said.
I'm not sure there is a way to bend the holiday to fit the situation any more than celebrating your own mother on Mother's Day makes you forget that you're not a mother yet yourself or that you lost your child. Back at Thanksgiving, I made suggestions to get through the holidays, but perhaps more important, more of a boost to get you through Christmas morning breakfast, is the knowledge that you're not alone. That there are countless other people struggling with the holiday because they also have someone missing from their lives on a holiday that is about a family forming.
To Baby and Beyond has a post about using Christmas to mark the year. Burble is remembering how George should be here for his first Christmas. Don't Scare Easy has a post about tentatively doing Christmas on her own terms this year. And even though she is currently pregnant, Breeder Beware is still not feeling Christmas-y.
How are you getting through the holidays?
Melissa is the author of the infertility and pregnancy loss blog, Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. She keeps a categorized blogroll of over 2000 infertility blogs and writes the daily Lost and Found and Connections Abound, a news source for the infertility blogosphere. Her infertility book, Navigating the Land of If, is currently on bookshelves (May, 2009). She is the keeper of the IComLeavWe list and compiles the yearly Creme de la Creme.
