Familial Separation Around The Holidays

This is my fifth holiday season since I separated myself from my biological family. It is also the first one where it has started to feel like my two siblings and I have started to build some kind of tradition around our celebrations. Things haven’t changed much, between the family holidays of years gone with our larger biological family and how we celebrate them these days: we gather at someone’s residence, bring food to share, cook a bunch of food for the event, and then eventually separate. There’s usually more stuff in there that we’re still kind of working out, though. We try to gather for longer periods of time, spending at least one night wherever we’re celebrating, so we can spend time with each other outside of the harried cooking, eating, and then cleaning of the larger holiday meal. We also try to find other little things we enjoy to include, like watching movies or TV shows (which is our primary form of social contact for most of the year: gathering on discord to watch a movie or some episodes of a TV show), or bring forward other traditions from our mutual past that we want to be able to still enjoy, like taking the time to build Lego sets on Thanksgiving morning or eating sugary cereals on Christmas morning. We’re still very much figuring out those kinds of particulars, but we’ve hit the point where we’ve at least settled into a couple options at most and are, as far as I can tell, just waiting to see what sticks.

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