Fuck Christmas

I'll say it plainly: fuck Christmas.

Not the idea of it. Not the goodwill or the generosity or the children opening presents. Those things are fine. What I mean is the version of Christmas that gets weaponised against anyone who doesn't have someone to share it with.

Alone in the Arctic

That particular Christmas, I was alone in the Arctic. Properly alone. Not "working remotely and feeling a bit isolated" alone. Alone in the way that means no phone signal, no neighbours, no shop within walking distance, and a darkness that starts at 2pm and doesn't lift until the next morning.

The temperature was somewhere around minus thirty. The snow was waist-deep in places. The only sounds were the wind and the occasional crack of a tree splitting from the cold.

The Weight of It

When you're alone at Christmas in the Arctic, the silence has a weight to it. It presses down. Every advertisement you've ever seen, every film, every song — they all told you that this day is supposed to be something. And here you are, in the dark, in the cold, with nothing but your own thoughts.

The first few hours were the hardest. Not because of the cold — I was used to that. But because of the gap between what the world says this day should be and what it actually was.

What I Found

Somewhere between heating water on a gas stove and watching the Northern Lights flicker through the trees, something shifted.

The pressure to perform Christmas disappeared. There was no one to perform it for. And in that absence, I found something I wasn't expecting: peace.

Not the greeting-card version. A harder kind. The kind that comes from sitting with discomfort until it stops being uncomfortable. The kind that comes from realising that you don't need a day on the calendar to tell you when to be grateful.

Resilience Isn't Pretty

People talk about resilience like it's a badge. Something you earn and then wear proudly. It's not. Resilience is ugly. It's crying in the dark at minus thirty because you're exhausted and lonely and there's no one coming to help. And then getting up the next morning and doing what needs to be done anyway.

That Christmas taught me that holidays are a construct. Useful, sometimes beautiful — but a construct. What's real is how you handle the moments when the construct falls away and you're left with just yourself.

So yeah. Fuck Christmas. But also — that particular Christmas, alone in the Arctic, in the dark, was one of the most important of my life.