Spending Christmas alone? I am – and I will enjoy it

Spending Christmas alone? I am – and I will enjoy it:

I don’t usually talk about it, though. Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness. Brows raise, eyes widen with concern. “Will you be all right?” such people ask me with great sincerity, as though I have announced plans to travel to a war-torn region or to give all my possessions to charity. The danger they see is, of course, to my emotional wellbeing. A person at Christmas alone seems likely to plunge into depression. 

 Their worry is not hard to understand. The rhetoric of our culture has insisted, for almost a century now, that Christmas is some kind of ultimate pronouncement on the strength of a family.

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