Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. ---Leo Buscaglia

For some of us, the holiday season can be the spiritual equivalent of crawling through broken glass. If your holiday is up-tempo, it may be easy to miss the signs in people around you that say they are having it rough. Everywhere are the songs of family, of togetherness, of "no place like home for the holidays” of people having their “holly jolly Christmas” or gathering around the Thanksgiving table to full gathering of family eating a bird and fixings designed by Norman Rockwell. The TV commercials show perfectly intact nuclear families. TV special movies are about families rallying at the last minute to become whole again, to reunite, to become the perfect family once again. They are full of the successful reconciliations of which some of us only dream. No one is left divorcing or divorced – dying or ill or mourning – hurting or suffering for any reason. During Thanksgiving/Hannukah/Christmas/Kwanzaa/New Years, America suddenly creates images of herself as a combination of the Cosby family, Beaver Cleaver’s family, and the Brady bunch -- all perfect and smiling as they deck the halls, light the menorah, carve the bird or sing Auld Lang Syne. No problem is so gigantic that it cannot be solved in a one hour special.

For some people, these images of flawless and iconic families are just foolish. For some, they cut like a knife, reminding people of what they do not have or didn’t have or were not able to have. From billboards to Christmas specials, the media rocks on about a mythological family ideal that suddenly will exist in our lives if we shop at the right stores, wear the right cologne, eat the right food. And if you do not have that kind of thoroughly unblemished life, shame on you. It is easy to forget that nobody has that life 24/7. Nobody.

I arrived in NY over 23 years ago, newly separated from my husband of 13 years. It was snowing. Snowing hard. I moved in with a high school friend, and started to look for work in early December. I watched my pennies vanish as I failed to find work. Christmas music blared from every speaker in town. One I kept hearing over and over again was “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The thought of Christmas being merry grew littler and littler every day. I grew to fear that song, and even today, so very many years later, I cannot hear it without remembering a particular icy morning long ago. I was looking for work.

I had stopped in at a coffee shop while in the process of applying for any job I might find. After great internal debate, I splurged recklessly on a steaming hot cup of coffee because it was so freezing cold outside. The lyrics came on, sung at the tremulous edge of a hopeful sob by Judy Garland “Someday soon we all will be together/If the fates allow/Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow/So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.” I had to almost run out of the coffee shop because I started to cry and couldn’t stop. I had lost any sense that I could muddle my way to a merry Christmas or even a decent holiday ever again. My dreams had been dashed, and I was fresh out of new ones. I had never been on my own before, and here I was in NYC, divorcing, going broke, jobless, cold. And I was frightened.

Although it wasn’t my roughest life moment, I didn’t tell anyone about that day. In fact, this is the first time I am telling this story. Those of you out there reading this may have similar stories from your own pasts, or much harder, more private stories. Or, for some of you, this holiday may be the rough one – the hurdle it doesn’t feel that you can get over.

I wish I had the magic formula for how I got through that and some subsequent hard holiday years. Sometimes it was just gutting it out, counting the days until January 2nd. Sometimes it was helpful to do things for other people, taking the focus off my own stuff. Sometimes, I was able to grab onto my faith and understand that I could ask God to carry me through to the other side of the season, whatever that meant – and , it worked. Sometimes people had to grab onto me and haul me through.

Sometimes it was all about focus – about forcing myself to look at what was good in my life, about letting my eyes and soul linger there. Sometimes I would have to write it out, or say out loud what was good and real and true in my life.

That freezing day I just kept walking through the snow and sleet. I was silently crying, but it didn’t show with my head facing down. I was walking up Fifth Avenue past the decorated fancy stores – Cartier’s, Lord and Taylor, Sak’s, Tiffany’s. There on the sidewalk near Sak’s sat a big black Labrador Retriever. He was sitting on a ragged and gray rectangular carpet sample, leaning up against a man’s legs. The man was a big man who was blind. His eyes looked odd and were almost crusty. He was selling pencils in a tin cup, almost like a living stereotype. He had a cardboard sign strung around his neck with string on which was a scrawled Bible verse. The dog was his Seeing Eye dog. The wind was fierce that day, bone-biting. The snow was being driven sideways. The man took off his nearly threadbare muffler and tied it in a knot around the dog’s head, in an effort at keeping his dog’s ears warm. The man zipped up his own jacket as tight as he could around his neck as his dog huddled even closer to his legs.

I reached in my pocket and gave him whatever change I had. I also had a dollar bill. He got that too.

I could at least be of some use to someone.

I started to breathe normally. I could be of use. I could be of use. I clung to that phrase like the life raft that it was. It gave me some meaning to hang onto.

The old man and his dog got me through that holiday. May God bless their souls.

Some people around us have never had good holidays. Dysfunctional families, severe illness, abuse, crippling poverty – they all leave lingering holiday wounds for so many. For some with active dysfunction in their lives, holidays are just a time to brace for more.

For those of you operating from a position of spiritual bounty, please be alert to those around you – not everyone has a place to go for the holidays, people to be with. Don’t assume that a suddenly quiet co-worker is just working hard. Maybe it is time to check in on those older family members, or those friends and neighbors who have recently experienced a loss, or those for whom the holidays may be a reminder of loss. If you haven’t heard from a friend in a while, maybe now is the time to check in. Sometimes even close friends will not volunteer the information of a holiday problem. But that does not mean that your love will not be a huge help.

If you are the one with the blues, and it feels too hard to just ride it out alone, please reach out. Call a friend, a priest, a rabbi, a minister. Tell your doctor, or call a therapist or a help line. Sometimes it takes some help to get through rough times, and it is no shame to admit that times are rough. Even strong, competent, brilliant, talented women get depressed and frightened and anxious and lonely. And you are not alone. The holidays are powerful triggers for everyone, heightening whatever we feel, amplifying it and playing it back to us on a loudspeaker.

If you have ever had to shore up your own spirit during the holidays, please tell us here – and help us know what got you through it.

Wrestling with holiday blues, some blogging sisters are:

Angi, at HOPE, STRENGTH, & COURAGE: My Story of Survival through Breast Cancer says:

In preparation for Thanksgiving, I have realized that deep down I feel like a lost soul without my Mom. Even at 33, not only do I feel incomplete without her, but I also feel very incompetent because I had no idea how to do much of the cooking to carry out this family tradition I am so used to. Since her passing many times I have felt much like an orphan.

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Syd, in her blog says

I can "feel" the holiday season approaching. As nearly everyone around me seems to be getting excited, I'm starting to feel depressed. And apparently I'm not alone. Feeling depressed at what most people consider to be the happiest time of the year is not something that most people who experience it feel comfortable talking about. It just isn't PC and most people who haven't felt it just don't get it.

Miss M at Magnificently Me says:

Every time a 'couples' holiday comes around--Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc-- and I'm single, I always get really depressed. I've been single for all holidays for a few years now and it's really getting old.