122124 : Entry Two : Bah Humbug?
Every year, as the Christmas season approaches, I feel a familiar weight settle in my chest. It’s not the joy or excitement that you might expect to feel in the lead-up to the holidays. Instead, it’s something more complicated, something I can’t quite shake. The holidays, with their colourful lights and festive cheer, are supposed to be a time of happiness, but for me, Christmas has always been a bit more… complicated.
I won’t go into the specifics of why Christmas has such a hold on me. Tt’s too personal, too wrapped up in family dynamics. But suffice it to say that growing up, Christmas Day wasn’t a celebration. It was a performance. For everyone outside the immediate family, Christmas always seemed perfect - smiles, laughter, the perfect holiday meal. But behind closed doors, it was nothing like that.
I remember watching the forced cheer of the day, my family playing along like actors in a play, pretending everything was fine while we all silently dealt with the cracks in our relationships. To the outside world, we were fine, but inside, the holidays were a reminder of all the things left unsaid, the old wounds that never quite healed. And as I grew older, I began to dread the season, each passing year bringing back those feelings of discomfort and alienation.
It wasn’t just the day itself - it was the entire season. Christmas, with its promise of warmth and togetherness, only highlighted the distance I felt from my family. I began to resent the bright decorations, the cheesy music, the whole spectacle of it. It felt like the world was celebrating something I couldn’t even connect with. The holidays were supposed to be about family, yet I couldn’t escape the truth that mine wasn’t what it seemed.
But something has shifted in me over the years. I no longer feel that deep resentment that once consumed me as the holidays approached. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment it started changing, but I do know that the intensity of my feelings has softened. I’ve learned that time has a way of softening even the sharpest of pains. There’s a distance now, a kind of quiet space between my past and my present self, a new perspective I didn’t have before. I’ve grown in ways I didn’t expect, and with that growth has come a subtle yet undeniable shift in how I approach the holidays.
For years, Christmas was a raw wound, a reminder of all that was wrong, all that was missing, all that was fractured in my family. It’s hard to look at the bright, festive lights of the season without remembering the shadows that lingered in our home. But now, I see those memories through a different lens. While Christmas still carries the weight of that past and the unhealed hurts, the dissonance between appearance and reality... I’ve begun to feel less burdened by them. It’s not that I’ve erased the past, or that everything is suddenly perfect. The ghost of those old holidays is still there. But I've started to accept the imperfections, the contradictions that come with this season. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, I’m learning to sit with the tension, to acknowledge that life isn’t about eradicating pain or finding a perfect narrative. It’s about living through the contradictions, finding some kind of peace within them.
And in that process, I’ve found a strange kind of healing. I think about a line from The Brothers Karamazov - a line that feels especially true now: “You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.” At first, this quote struck me as a harsh reality, almost like an inevitability in the way suffering seems to follow us, always burning us in one way or another. But as time has passed, I’ve come to see it as something more redemptive. The burning isn’t just about destruction, it’s about transformation. In a way, the Christmas season has become a kind of burn for me. The holidays still stir up emotions, old wounds, and perhaps even new ones. But each year, as I face it again, I feel a little more healed.
That’s the thing about Christmas now. It’s not that I’ve forgotten the past or made it disappear. It’s still there, like a scar on the surface. But it no longer has the same power over me. I can feel the heat of it, but I don’t let it consume me. As Dostoyevsky’s characters are always trying to reconcile their past with their present, so too have I come to understand that healing isn’t an absence of pain. Healing is the ability to endure it, to face it without turning away, and in the process, to find a new sense of peace. Christmas, with all its tangled emotions, is no longer something to dread. It’s something I can simply be with. I still hold onto the remnants of that old discomfort. The nostalgia, the grief, the sense that something is missing. I’ve also learned to embrace what is there. Just as Dostoyevsky’s characters suffer and are reborn, I’ve started to accept that my relationship with Christmas can evolve too. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be easy. But it can still be meaningful to me in my own ways.
Oddly enough, I've found a strange kind of comfort in something I used to dismiss entirely: Christmas romance novels and Christmas Hallmark movies. I used to roll my eyes at them, thinking they were too fake. The characters always had perfect lives, perfect love stories, and perfect holiday dinners. It was like an idealised version of Christmas that I couldn’t relate to - too shiny, too happy, and certainly too different from the reality I grew up with. For years, I stayed away, convinced that these stories were nothing more than empty fluff. And somewhere along the way, I changed. Now, I find myself watching them, reading them, and feeling… well, a little comforted. It’s hard to explain. They’re predictable, yes. I know exactly how it will end before it even begins. (That's the appeal of the Romance genre, after all.) But there’s something so soothing about the certainty of it all and the way, no matter what, love and happiness always win out in the end. And there’s something kind of magical about that, especially during Christmas. It’s stepping into a world where everything is okay, where the messy, complicated parts of life fade away, if only for a little while. I guess we all need that break sometimes. A place where things are simple, where people can overcome their problems with a little help from mistletoe and a cup of hot cocoa.
It’s funny, because I used to scoff at the idea of love being so perfect, so easy. But now, I get it. Maybe it’s not that these stories are perfect; maybe it’s that they offer something I didn’t realise I needed: a glimpse of what love could look like if it were free from the struggles, the baggage, and the weight of the world. It’s the kind of love I used to dream about when I was younger - the kind that felt untouched by all the messiness of life.
This feeling takes me back to a line from The Brothers Karamazov that I didn’t fully understand until now: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” The first time I read that, it stung a little. Love as “harsh” and “dreadful”? Too close to home. Love was supposed to be beautiful, warm, effortless. But now, I see it differently. The love in real life isn’t always gentle. It can be messy, it’s tough sometimes, and sometimes it feels like it will burn you out. And while that can be true, there’s also something deeply real about it. It requires patience, forgiveness, and sacrifice. It’s not the stuff of fairy tales, but it’s real.
And that’s why I’ve found comfort in these Christmas stories. They offer a kind of escape, yes, but also a kind of permission. They give me a space to experience the idealised love I once thought was just a dream. A love that, for a little while, makes everything feel right. It’s like a safe haven where, for a brief moment, the complications of life can be set aside, and love wins with no strings attached. I know that this is fantasy, but that doesn’t make it any less comforting.
This shift in how I view Christmas reminds me of something that Dostoyevsky often explored in his writing: the contradictions within us, the tension between what we desire and the reality of our lives. It’s a theme that runs deep in The Brothers Karamazov, where the characters wrestle with opposing forces of belief and doubt, love and suffering, faith and despair. The internal battles they face echo something familiar we probably all experience to some degree: a tug-of-war between what we long for and what we can accept as true.
The most striking example of this conflict is found in the relationship between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, two brothers whose views on life couldn’t be more different. Ivan is the skeptic, the intellectual, the one who sees only the darkness and suffering in the world. He is haunted by the existence of cruelty, injustice, and human suffering, and he questions how any loving God could allow such things. In his famous line, “If there is no God, everything is permitted,” Ivan speaks not just about the absence of faith, but about the collapse of all moral and spiritual boundaries when there is no higher power to impose them. Ivan’s perspective reflects the disillusionment I once felt toward Christmas, as I saw only the cracks in my family’s facade, the things that weren’t being said, the undercurrent of pain and false pretenses that ran through every holiday celebration. Like Ivan, I struggled with the idea of a perfect, joyful holiday when all I could see was the contradiction between the ideal and the real.
On the other hand, there’s Alyosha, his younger brother, whose faith in God, love, and the goodness of life stands in stark contrast to Ivan’s despair. Alyosha is a believer, a character who represents the possibility of grace, the transformative power of love, and the hope that even in the most difficult circumstances, we can find redemption. In the face of suffering, Alyosha holds onto his faith, believing that love is the answer to life’s cruelty and confusion. To him, Christmas is a reminder of that grace, a time to reflect on the possibility of healing and forgiveness. And yet, Alyosha's path is not without its own struggles. His faith is challenged, especially by Ivan’s dark view of the world, and in a way, Alyosha is forced to confront the reality of suffering too. It’s as if Dostoyevsky is saying that belief in love and faith doesn’t come easily. It requires a kind of resilience in the face of everything that seems to contradict it.
When I think about how Christmas has shifted for me, I see echoes of this inner conflict between Ivan and Alyosha. On one hand, I still feel the pull of skepticism and the weight of past disappointments and the tension between what Christmas “should” be and what it actually was. There’s still a part of me that wants to say, “If there’s no perfect Christmas, then what’s the point?” Like Ivan, I struggle with the sense that the world - or at least the Christmas season, in my case - doesn’t always live up to the expectations we place on it. But then there’s another part of me, one that wants to believe in the magic of the season because I never had it growing up. The possibility of connection, of warmth, of hope. Like Alyosha, I’ve come to see that there can be something redemptive in the imperfection of it all, something that still brings us back to the heart of the holiday: love, belonging, and the possibility of transformation.
This tension between idealism and despair, between what I desire Christmas to be and what it actually has been, captures the essence of what Dostoyevsky’s characters grapple with throughout The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan’s words, “If there is no God, everything is permitted,” aren’t just a challenge to religious belief, they’re a confrontation with the raw, painful truth of life’s contradictions. Without hope everything feels meaningless, and nothing can stop the destructive forces that tear at us. But the characters, especially Alyosha, remind us that even in the darkest times, it’s our ability to love, to hold onto something higher than ourselves, that makes life meaningful. It’s the same with Christmas for me. Even as I feel the pull of the past and the shadows of family and the weight of lost expectations, I’ve found that there is still a quiet, simple kind of grace in the season.
That’s probably where the true spirit of Christmas lies. Not in the idealised perfection of Hallmark movies or in the flawless vision of family gatherings, but in the messy, complicated love that persists despite everything else. It’s a kind of love that acknowledges suffering, but still chooses to hope, to believe, and to love. Just as Alyosha’s faith is not naive, but tempered with understanding of the world’s pain, I’ve come to see Christmas not as a perfect holiday, but as one that, like life itself, contains both light and shadow. It’s the tension between the two that makes it meaningful.
This struggle between light and dark, faith and doubt, is something I recognise in myself during the Christmas season. Christmas, for me, is always a mixture of light - the nostalgia, the magical holiday lights, the warmth, the joy of things like romance novels - and dark, the shadows of past disappointments and the pain of family fractures. Just like Ivan Karamazov, I wrestle with the duality of wanting something perfect, while knowing that perfection will always be out of reach. In his words, “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
And there it is: the root of my discomfort. Christmas was never just about family for me. It was about love. The lack of it. The absence of it, hidden behind pretenses and the performance of happiness. Yet as I’ve grown, I’ve learned that love isn’t always what we expect it to be. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, I’ve had to come to terms with the messy, painful aspects of love, and the times when it’s complicated, when it’s not ideal, when it’s imperfect. But in the end, love is still there, even if it looks different than what we imagined.
I still feel the tension every year when Christmas rolls around, and the lingering feeling of something lost. But I no longer let it consume me. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, I’ve come to accept that life is full of contradictions, and Christmas, with all its joy and sorrow, is no different. As Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brother Karamazov: "Always choose humble love, always. Once you have chosen it, you will always have what you need to conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a powerful force, the most powerful, and there is nothing in the world to approach it. Once you have chosen it, you will always have what you need to conquer the whole world." And for all the turmoil I may feel, I’ve come to realise that Christmas is what we choose to make of it.
It’s not perfect, and it probably never will be. But that’s okay. Because, in the end, maybe it’s the imperfections that make Christmas, and life, worth celebrating.