Celebrating Christmas when your spouse recently died sucks. The first Christmas after my husband died, I clearly remember dreading all the associated festivities and socializing, but also feeling self-imposed pressure to somehow make the holidays feel extra magical for my seven-year-old daughter, who still believed in Santa, to try to compensate for having lost her dad.

When I asked my daughter what she wanted for Christmas, she said she wanted her Daddy to be alive, but she knew that wasn’t going to happen. So she also listed varied toys, thankfully.

From my daughter’s perspective, Christmas starts the day after Thanksgiving and lasts until New Year’s Eve. On the first day of December, the pressure was on me to hide the elf on the shelf. This had always been my late husband’s task because he loved setting up creative scenes, like when he set up the the elf in a sled in a snow bank next to our house, as if the elf sledded off our roof. While I loved the scenes he set up at the time, he had set the bar too high for me. The best I could do is put the elf in the microwave or in a closet. My brain couldn’t come up with anything more creative. I found the nightly task to be a burden, just another thing to add to my to do list, but I had to do it because she loved looking for the elf in the morning.

I decided to participate in as many Christmas activities as possible, hoping to distract us. So when a friend invited us to an event at the local town farm to sing Christmas carols in a barn with cows, sheep and other humans, I said yes. In hindsight, I should’ve known this was a mistake. I’m a horrible singer on the best of days, but it’s really tough to sing joyful carols when you’d rather be curled in the fetal position. The caroling was then followed by mingling with friends and acquaintances I last saw at my husband’s wake. I’m an introvert and do not enjoy small talk in general, but this was torture. I counted the minutes until I could leave and decided that I would only go to small gatherings with close friends or family. It was too much effort to small talk with acquaintances at that time.

We buried my husband’s ashes in a cemetery two weeks before Christmas. He had died in late October, but it took his mother and me this long to decide in which cemetery to bury his ashes and to arrange the logistics. I know most people scatter ashes, but I wanted to bury his ashes in a cemetery so that my daughter would always have a place to go to visit him. I wrote more about this in an earlier blog post. While this didn’t help put us in the Christmas spirit, it made me feel better that the burial wasn’t still hanging over our heads.

Every weekend, we watched Christmas movies on Netflix, starting with the Christmas Chronicles series. For some reason, every recent Christmas movie for kids seems to involve a parent dying. I panicked during the first movie we watched, then noticed that my daughter didn’t seem bothered by it. In fact, I think the movies may have helped her, because they normalized having a dead parent at Christmastime. This could have just as easily triggered a grieving kid though.

We did all the Christmas stuff we usually did: Taking a photo with Santa, driving around to see Christmas lights, and putting up our artificial tree, which I assembled for the first time by myself, a small triumph. We hung a stocking for my husband, which we still do, and I wrapped some presents for her from him since he had bought them far in advance. But I did not to hang up our outdoor Christmas lights; it felt like too big of a task so I let it go.

On Christmas Eve, we went to a friend’s house for lunch and a gift exchange. In the evening, we had dinner with my brother-in-law’s family, something we hadn’t done since before my daughter was born. To her, it was a new tradition and we’ve continued doing it ever since. She had a great time hanging out with her older cousins and opening presents from them.

When we came home, we put out cookies and carrots for Santa and the reindeer. After my daughter went to bed, I wrote a letter to her from Santa, which my husband had always done. I had to look at letters he previously wrote to get an idea of what to write since my brain couldn’t come up with anything. But I did not try to create deer hoof prints out of flour on our fireplace as my husband had done the year before. I was tired and couldn’t bring myself to do it.

On Christmas, after opening presents at home, we spent the day at my parents’ house with my sister’s family and parents, eating lots of food and opening more presents. My daughter always loves playing with her younger cousins who adore her. It was a good day.

I felt like I had been holding my breath for the whole month and could finally breathe when it was all over. But I did have some moments of fun and happiness, and my daughter seemed to have a blast. In retrospect, I recommend a few things that we did:

• Keep up the old traditions that the kids love, let go of the ones that don’t serve you anymore, and make new ones.
• Spend lots of time with close friends and family.
• Avoid events where you have to engaged in small talk with acquaintances, especially if you are an introvert!
• Watch lots of Christmas movies, but google the plot in advance if you think your kid(s) will be upset by a parent dying in the story.
• Go easy on yourself… Try not to add to your stress by putting extra pressure on yourself.