The Most Wonderful? Time of the Year: How to Pursue Pleasure during the Holiday Season

by Taylor Neal

The holidays bring up very different things for us all.

Despite my sarcastic tone in titling this article, it is a sweeping generalization and honestly, extremely anxiety inducing for this time of the year to be referred to as “the most wonderful,” when in fact there is a large population of folks for which the holidays are a dreaded, confusing time that we must simply get through in order to go back to regular life and put them behind us for another year.

Complicated family dynamics, financial obligations, endless To-Do lists, overly packed social calendars, and so many more factors come into play the moment the retail world decides it’s time to pull Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey out of hibernation, and on top of this, the overwhelming pressure to be joyful and festive all day every day is enough to make one want to curl up in a ball and hide, as if this were an option, and it is straight up not based in reality whatsoever.

The holiday season is something that has been marketed to us as an idea, as a concept of how we should be and how we should feel in order to successfully complete the task that is the holiday experience. If we take a moment to pause and reflect however, we remember that the primary goal of marketing is to sell fantasy. The fantasy of the nuclear family – a happy one at that, the fantasy of indulgence and luxury, the fantasy of accessibility and acceptance into festive traditions and family, the fantasy of the cis-het, white, North American dream. While on an intellectual level, many of us can recognize the absurdity of this and try our hardest to release these notions from our personal views and experiences of this season, it remains that for many folks the holidays continue to bring a sense of shame, obligation, and often guilt no matter what we seem to do. These feelings linger, and then swell, each time we refuse to follow the norms indicated by the way this time of year has been structured on a societal level.

Shame, obligation and guilt. In other words, emotional tension.

Emotional tension in this context is often inflicted by expectations and external situations which do not feel natural or aligned to us in our bodies, therefore causing internal conflict, self-doubt and discomfort in our own skin as we force ourselves to follow through with things that exist outside of what we choose for ourselves to fit our needs. We are told that spending time with our family, and by this I mean our bloodline relatives, is what will bring us joy. That eating certain foods and dressing up and attending social gatherings and drinking alcohol and gift giving will bring us joy, so then when we show up to the family dinner and move through the motions and feel more emptiness than we have felt since last year’s family holiday gatherings, we start to look inward and think “what’s wrong with me?” We engage in conversations that we must shrink and filter ourselves in order to pursue, laugh at jokes that sting our skin like the Canadian winter air, and even find ourselves feeling a weird sense of guilt and obligation to eating foods we don’t normally consume, all to please those around us that only really know a small, curated version of who we are and regard us as so.

And then we start to consider bringing queerness into these spaces, and often, this part of us gets left at home in an effort to take the path of least resistance rather than facing the repercussions of asking to make space at the table for queerness to be nourished as well.

I could go on and on about the nuances of what the holiday season may bring up for people of various identities who find themselves in various uncomfortable holiday settings, and this article could be titled “What the F*ck are we Doing?” But instead, I would like to confront it all with a simple concept that comes with a life-long practice of unlearning and retraining.

Pleasure.

Let me say it here and now, Pleasure is your birthright. I’ll say it again. No matter who you are, where you are or how you are, Pleasure is your birthright.

Often, as queer folks, pleasure is a challenging element to unlock in our bodies. We have been conditioned to believe that our existence is taboo and invalid, and therefore the concept of queer pleasure is often out of the question, when to get to exist in safety is all we really feel we can hope for. Over the holiday season then, as folks of the queer community strive simply to survive tumultuous family dynamics, isolation, and the general toxicity and heteronormativity of the season at large, there is much conversation about “how to survive.” Because we need it. We swap strategies of how to move through the discomfort, how to step away when we need to, how to show up in a way that creates the least amount of tension and discomfort for others. Together, we support one another as a community and come together in the new year patting one another on the back for a job well done in coming out on the other side of the festivities in one piece. And I recognize the immensity of this feat, and genuinely commend each of us for coming out on the other side in one piece each year! We did it! Onward we march!

What I want to suggest here however, is not only that we deserve to survive, but that we deserve to feel pleasure through our holiday season. I’ll emphasize that, our holiday season. Instead of thinking of, and feeling the fear which surrounds, our family visits, our big group dinners, work Christmas parties and so on, I invite us all to slow down for a moment, to tune into ourselves and our bodies, and listen to ourselves long enough to hear what it is that actually brings us pleasure. And then lean into that, unapologetically.

What would it look like to step back, not just from the dinner table to excuse yourself for a bathroom break when really what you need is a few deep breaths to collect your emotions and keep your cool through the rest of the meal, but to step back far enough that you can evaluate and really start to visualize what a joy-filled, pleasurable holiday season would look like to you. Who would be there? Where and how would you spend your precious days off of work? What would feel festive, celebratory, or relaxing for you? How does this feel?

Where does your heart gravitate if you are to look at the holidays as a blank canvas, yours for the painting with all of the vibrant colour and fullness of who you are and how you experience pleasure?

And then how do we start to integrate this picture into our reality?

It has to start with the releasing of that emotional tension mentioned earlier, and this looks different for everyone. For some, this is committing to carving out time for self-care, movement practice, meditation, or whatever your regular routine is during the holiday chaos. For some, this looks like having uncomfortable conversations with the people we need to share our truth with. For others, this looks like not having to explain anything to anyone, and instead having those conversations with yourself until you can stand firmly in this truth without wavering. However we manage to release emotional tension, we must carve out the time, space and courage, to do so, before we can integrate new patterns.

You cannot expect clear water if you pour into a muddy vessel.

What I suggest, is a very deliberate, intentional naming of our tension. Take a couple of minutes, a pen and paper, and write a list of all the things you believe about the holiday season. All of the associations you hold with this time of year, all of the things you are expected to do, all of the places, and all of the ways, that you are expected to show up, and all of the things (traditions, beliefs, religious associations or foundations) that you have held onto and have been imposed on you since childhood, which create the blueprints for how you experience the holidays. Then, once you have an extensive, honest list of what makes up your holiday season, go through this list and circle everything on it that brings you real, true pleasure.

Once you have your list reviewed, make a new list on a brand-new piece of paper, titled My Pleasurable Holiday Blueprint. Transfer the circled items from the previous list over to this space, and then add anything you can think of that would add any amount of joy or pleasure to the existing pieces. Anything you can think of, even if it’s as simple as hanging out alone or with your partner in your pajamas for the entire day or just cooking different foods, this is your space to do with and design as you wish. Essentially, re-write your holiday season. If there are many things that transfer from the original list to the new one, run with that, and still see if there is anything you can add to enhance the pleasure of the existing blueprint. If nothing transfers, you have a blank canvas! Play! Be honest with yourself in this practice, take your time with it, and allow your imagination to take over.

This is integration. Looking at what exists, completely dismantling it into its parts, seeing what feels good to keep and what we can leave behind, and then moving forward with only the things we truly still feel connected to from the past toward a more aligned, authentic way of living. And moving forward in this way with our priority as pleasure.

I am not claiming that this will be easy, or that it won’t come with difficult conversations and challenging emotional hurdles. I am also not claiming it will be immediate. It may take several years, and several different series of trial and error before we figure out what feels good and what works for us, and I ask us all to be patient with ourselves as we figure it all out. What I am suggesting, is that when we start designing our lives in ways that align with our truth, when we start believing that we are worthy and deserving of pleasure and then give ourselves the things that bring us towards it, we minimize the emotional tension we carry. When we stop shrinking ourselves to fit into containers that are simply the wrong shape for us, we can show up more fully and with more presence to the things that actually fill us up, feel good, and bring us joy.