O Hear The Angel Voices
a creative writing post (#42)
This post has several embedded YouTube videos. Depending on your device and/or settings, you may have to click to watch them on YouTube. There are also so many pictures that it’s been deemed too long for email. Click the title to read it on the Substack website.
An Apology About Comments: I’ve gotten several emails expressing impatience with my current policy, wherein comments are open on weekends but closed during the workweek. Y’all, I’m really sorry. I made comments a perk of paid subs, and it sucks that they’re closed a lot. I intend to bring them back but for now I’m still having MAJORLY INTENSE ANXIETY at my new job. It’s a great job and I strongly suspect that in a year I’ll love it beyond words. The learning curve is just testing me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Pray for me; I don’t think anyone’s listening, but I could be wrong and maybe it’ll help. Comments will be on during the workweek once my anxiety is closer to something like my baseline.
Capital-I Issues
Every screwed-up person I know has capital-I Issues around Christmas.
I’m one of them. Yep, that’s me!
A screwed-up person with capital-I Issues around Christmas.
But over time, I’ve found a way to live with those Issues that’s significantly easier than it used to be.
If you’ve got your own Issues with Christmas, this post is for you.
Some people try to ignore Christmas entirely, but in the U.S., that’s nearly impossible. Christmas isn’t just a day; it’s a season with its own colors, smells, rituals, and sounds—inescapable, whether you love it or hate it.
For me, the themes of Christmas—the “happy family” narrative and the magical innocence of children—used to rankle deeply. My childhood Christmas experiences were far from magical.
A Christmas when I was a kid left me carrying a particular kind of baggage: a fixation on gift-giving, born from a moment that probably changed the trajectory of my life.
As a kid, I gave my father a gift that was met with words that were abusive by any definition. That moment taught me something: gifts can be dangerous. It’s a lesson I’ve carried into adulthood, where I’ve become exceptional at choosing gifts, but for complicated reasons.
I’ve only ever told that story to my therapist and to one friend. The latter said, after hearing the story, “Yeah…that’ll fuck you up. Now I see why you’re so invested in choosing excellent gifts.”
He wasn’t wrong. My concern about choosing meaningful gifts that communicate love has as at least as much to do with that moment as it does with me.
(“About time,” I hear my therapist’s voice saying in my head.)
But here’s the thing: I do love giving gifts. Finding the perfect one for someone who matters to me fills me with a warm, fuzzy joy that feels like the strongest argument I have—against myself, my chief accuser—that I am, in fact, capable of love. (A fucked-up-enough childhood will leave that something a person doubts…)
The joy of gift-giving is complex, like everything else shaped by trauma. Some days, it’s 90% love and 10% fear of rejection. Other days, it’s flipped. Most days, I’d say it averages 80/20 in favor of love, which is real progress for me.
Rationally, I know no one in my circle would reject me over a bad gift—or over skipping Christmas entirely.
But what the mind knows and how the nervous system reacts are often two very different things.
So yeah, I have Issues.
Hell, I have more than Issues. I have subscriptions.
I know I’m far from alone in that. Christmas can be brutal for so many reasons—loneliness, painful memories, impossible expectations.
Being alone on Christmas hurts, but it’s far better than spending it with people who use the season as an excuse to inflict harm. I have it much easier than many of you, and I know that.
But maybe some of my thoughts will help anyway.
Where I Settled On Christmas
For years, I tried to ignore Christmas entirely. I resented it, avoided public spaces from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, and felt the full weight of everything I lacked in terms of family and love.
Now? I decorate. I enjoy the hell out of the music. I have fun shopping, and I genuinely love the season.
It’s not perfect. Around noon on Christmas Day, the darkness still comes for me. That’s just part of living with my past, at least for now. If I ever have a family, maybe that’ll change. But for now, the decision to embrace the season shapes my experience—until it doesn’t.
The best Christmas Day of my adult life was in 2021, when I fell and broke my wrist that morning. I was in so much pain that the darkness didn’t stand a chance. It was, oddly, a blessing.
So I enjoy the season and pretend that Christmas afternoon isn’t out there waiting for me.
And you know what?
Things are infinitely better than when I tried to ignore it.
What Changed: What I Love About Christmas
Three things helped me reclaim Christmas: decorations, the Christmas story, and the music.
Music, especially, is my catapult into joy. It feels new to me, even now. I only got good hearing aids about eight years ago, and for the first time, I could really hear Christmas music. I love it more than almost anything else.
Most days in December, despite how anxiety-filled I am at present, I still spend my work hours singing Christmas songs—something I’ll never do in front of another person. (Trust me, “never hearing a deaf girl sing” should be on your gratitude list.) 🤣🤣🤣
My three favorites are “O Holy Night,” “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and “Carol of the Bells,” each for wildly different reasons.
Despite thinking I’d shaken the religion of my childhood, these songs surprise me with how deeply they move me.
Before I go behind the paywall, here’s a brilliant performance of “O Holy Night” by David Phelps. For extra fun, watch some reaction videos to it—you won’t regret it.
And here’s Mark Lowry, about whom I’ve written before, doing his song, “Mary, Did You Know?” with Voctave:
The section after the paywall has my thoughts on decorations; my take on the Christmas story; a bunch of pictures from my collection of Christmas decorations, most of which are LEGO; and a personal story about the other reasons, beyond the poetry, why these are my three favorite Christmas songs.
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