When Christmas Is Not Kind

On acceptance, judgment, and reality

Christmas arrives each year with a promise that is not universal. For some, it brings return and warmth. For others, it arrives as a season of exposure, when what has been fractured or withheld becomes harder to ignore. The days are shorter, the noise is louder, and absence has a way of announcing itself.

Much of the suffering of this season does not come from what is happening, but from what the mind makes of it. The Stoics understood this well. They observed that events themselves are often modest in their force, while the judgments we attach to them are not.

The event may be simple: you are not with your family. What follows is rarely simple. The mind begi

ns to speak, quietly and without asking permission. Something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with them. I should be different. They should be different. I am being rejected. I am failing at something everyone else seems to manage. I am not wanted. I do not belong. These thoughts do not arrive as questions; they arrive as conclusions, and before one notices, a fact has been turned into a verdict.

The Stoics insisted that this moment matters. Epictetus wrote that people are disturbed not by events, but by the meaning they give to them. Christmas, with its rituals and expectations, gives meaning freely. It invites comparison, memory, and longing to speak at once.

When family has not been kind, distance is often mistaken for failure. It can feel like proof of inadequacy, or like abandonment replayed in a different form. Yet distance can mean many things. It can mean protection from harm. It can mean the recognition that closeness was never safe. It can mean that others do not know how to relate without control or demand. And sometimes, difficult as it is to accept, it can mean that others simply do not want closeness. The Stoics would not ask us to soften this truth. They would ask us to see it clearly.

Marcus Aurelius reminded himself that what others think, choose, or refuse belongs to them. The work that remains is narrower and quieter: to govern one’s own judgment, and to refuse to act against one’s own character in response to another’s limitation.

Acceptance begins here. Not as approval, and not as resignation, but as accuracy. Seneca advised that what cannot be reformed must be endured. Endurance, as he meant it, was not bitterness or collapse. It was the decision to stop arguing with what has already occurred.

This argument, when it persists, does not stay in the mind. It settles in the body. Shoulders tighten. Breath shortens. Sleep becomes restless. Marcus Aurelius described anxiety as a disturbance contrary to nature, a kind of internal disorder. Nature does not protest its seasons. Winter comes, and the body shivers. Summer returns, and the body sweats. The suffering begins when the mind refuses to accept the cold.

To accept is to allow this refusal to loosen. When judgment softens, the body follows. The Stoics did not dramatize this process. They practiced it by stripping things of their excess meaning and returning them to their simplest form.

Epictetus offered an image for this discipline. He said that everything has two handles: one by which it can be carried, and one by which it cannot. The event remains the same. The grip determines whether it wounds.

Christmas is a wave of this kind. It arrives whether one invites it or not. Marcus Aurelius imagined the trained mind as a rock standing while waves break against it. The wave does not ask permission. It strikes and passes. The rock does not chase it.

There is no triumph in this posture. There is only steadiness. Seneca wrote that the wise do not put a wrong construction upon everything. Sometimes wisdom is nothing more than the refusal to add cruelty to pain.

Marcus Aurelius observed that very little is needed to make a good life. Not because life is generous, but because clarity is enough. When judgment is released, what remains is often bearable, even in seasons that are not kind.

Christmas passes. The lights dim. The days begin, slowly, to lengthen. What remains is the mind one carries forward. The Stoics did not promise comfort. They offered something quieter and more durable: the possibility of remaining intact.

A Stoic Reflection for Christmas Day

Sit quietly and notice what is present, without naming it good or bad. The day has arrived. The body is here. Breath moves in and out without instruction.

Say to yourself: this is what is given. What is not given is not mine to demand.

If tension is present, allow it to soften without forcing it away. If feeling arises, let it pass without explanation.

Recall Marcus Aurelius’ reminder: you have power over your mind, not outside events. In this, strength is found.

Let the day pass. Remain standing.

My top recommendation

If today feels heavy, you don’t have to carry it with great seriousness. Sometimes it helps to shift your attention toward something simpler and kinder.

Do something small for someone else, a smile will do it. Watch something that makes you laugh. Eat your favourite dessert without overthinking it. Notice the tenderness of a baby’s smile or the uncomplicated joy of animals.

None of this fixes everything. But it can loosen the grip of the moment — and occasionally, it makes the day easier for someone else too.

You don’t need to solve anything today.

Just allow a little lightness to exist.

If this day teaches us anything, it may be this: the mind can be trained too. And the better trained it is, the less alone we feel in moments like these.