According to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, Ireland is the loneliest country in Europe. The study released last summer showed that 20 per cent of Irish respondents reported feeling lonely most or all of the time. Here is something we do not say aloud enough, especially at this time of year, when there is such pressure to engage in gratitude and connection with family and, for some reason, to post photos on social media where everyone is wearing matching Penneys pyjamas – Christmas is not a straightforward time.
For those who have a dispersed family or community, as so many Irish people do, Christmas can be a sacred time when, like a murmuration of starlings, everyone turns for home. School friends congregate in the snug of the perilously overheated local pub on Christmas Eve. Siblings travel home from Australia with arms sunburnt to just above the elbow, stockings full of Tim Tams and that whisky your dad likes from duty free.
It is a beacon at the darkest point of the year when the scattered people you love gather around a table to overeat and make affable fun of one another. That’s the best-case scenario. I’m not confident that this is how it goes for most of us, though. For those without a strong community or family around them, Christmas can be a time of deep grief and questioning. Another means by which we are failing to meet social expectation in a world that seems increasingly structured around remoteness rather than interconnectedness. That’s lonely.
Children should (hopefully) be in a frenzy for the next several days, reminiscent of your friend Dave who accidentally ingested ketamine in sixth year – ungovernable, dissociating wildly and wandering into your room in the middle of the night wearing undersized dinosaur pyjamas to loudly suggest we all go for milkshakes. Also to ask if Santa is “coming tonight or what?”. The anticipatory element of Christmas still maintains an uncomplicated sweetness for children, and that’s more than enough for them to be getting on with this week. It’s more complex for those of us who have had the good fortune to live through decades of Christmases. This is a time that drags every ‘should’ and ‘ought’ you’ve stored away to the forefront of your mind. The relationships you don’t have. The ones you have but feel alone in. The people whose chairs at the table ought to be occupied but will be empty this year. What and where we ought to have and be by now, and how we don’t feel the way we should.
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If you’re lucky enough to have family to spend Christmas with, every crack in your collective dynamic will loom perilously over you all. You’ll seethe at your sister’s intolerant political diatribes over her nut roast or join the rest of the family in silently pretending your uncle (who smells suspiciously of cough syrup and blames immigration for the rising cost of Kerrygold butter) isn’t very clearly off the wagon again. You’ll find yourself regressing into the version of yourself everyone presumed you were twenty years ago, huffing petulantly when your father asks you what it is you do for work again because he doesn’t understand tech stuff, and considering upending the dinner table when your mother asks primly, her mouth pinched as an overcooked sprout, whether “there’s really any need for you to be having a second slice of Christmas cake.” You know that she deserves more tolerance and goodwill than you can find within yourself to offer. You feel thirteen, trapped and distinctly misunderstood. You consider storming up to your bedroom and kicking the door shut. You’ll be 43 next birthday.
Christmas just isn’t straightforward. No matter your age – and the loneliness study attests that young people, especially students, are unprecedentedly lonely as well as older people— it is almost impossible not to engage in comparison with past experiences and our perception of other people’s lives. It sets us adrift. Perhaps you’re alone and missing your own passive-aggressive mother. Or mourning a version of Christmas you can never experience again for whatever reason, reluctant to forge new traditions when you miss the old ones.
Maybe you’re lost in yearning for the version of Christmas you always longed for, surrounded by raucous children pressing buttons on the same incomprehensibly irritating battery-operated toy your stupid brother bought them again this year. Perhaps that never happened for you and this Christmas morning will not trill with little voices at all. The silence can be profoundly lonely. Or maybe it did work out for you and you’re already ashamed of how irritating you’ll find those voices as they saw through your ears at four o’clock on Christmas morning. Why can’t you simply be in this moment without feeling exhausted or overwhelmed? Why must the magic you lovingly create for them require you to have no respite of your own? The incongruity can be lonely.
Perhaps you’re far from home in a new place and culture, as is the case for so many new immigrants to Ireland as well as our own abroad, and Christmas looks unrecognisable or new to you, a problem you don’t know how to solve. We might begin by relaxing the performance we collectively engage in around this time and with it, the pressure. Yes – it’s lovely. A shared comfort and rare period of easing pace in a year that most of us have to white-knuckle our way through while dousing the friction-induced flames of our own overwhelmed panic. And yes - it’s a time of dissonance. It’s lonely. We are lonely anyway. Christmas magnifies that. In a disconnected world, we might find a connection in embracing the dissonance and seeking one another through all that elaborate decoration.