Holiday Blues

The holiday season is a joyous time when family and friends come together to celebrate their religious values or their own love for each other. Families feel so compelled to be together they can travel miles to visit with loved ones. Holidays of every religious background always seem to have the same overall effect on all the people that celebrate them.

Those joyous moments of revelry can fix any emotional and damaging wounds the people in a family may have. Disputes with family and friends disappear. A father who is ashamed of his son for not following in his footsteps will have the time to make his voice heard, and the son, who may be carrying anger for his father for not respecting his choices will have the chance to face him. In that respect, a person might say that the only reason the holidays can fix the problems in a family is by shutting a family together in a house and forcing them to deal with their issues.

The same cannot be said for everyone. A person who doesn’t have any family or friends may choose to stay home and never bother to deal with his or her problems. They may feel so shut in and alone that they might actually get incredibly depressed. That sad and lonely person will see couples, families, whole groups of people enjoying each other’s company and start asking themselves, “why am I here?” or “why put myself through this anymore?”

There are those people who have lost someone very close to them just before the holiday season and are having a difficult time coping with their loss. Imagine having to go to a funeral – one of the most solemn and heart-wrenching experiences a person can have in their lifetime just a week before everyone else is running around with expressions of sheer joy and senility on their faces while greeting a distant relative they’ve always loved but haven’t seen in a while. A person who just buried the love of their life will see all the love shared by others, and they won’t be able to deny feelings of resentment, jealousy or pain.

Those images will flood that sad person with memories of his or her own joy and happiness with that person they just lost.
The holiday season can be bleak or wonderful. The holidays can bring families closer. The holidays can also be a time when people feel the most pain and sorrow. It appears as though those are two very different examples of circumstances and feelings surrounding the holidays, but don’t think twice about it. Everyone who celebrates the holidays feels both joy and pain when having to go shopping for gifts at the store.