Good Little Tips From People Who Never Spend Holiday With Family

The conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic mean this holiday season is the first that many grown-ass adults will be spending away from their families of origin and chosen families, stuck faraway since travel and mixing households are two of the worst things one can choose to do right now. 

But a lot of people—maybe even some of your very own friends and neighbors!—are extremely accustomed to spending holidays apart or going months or even years without seeing family. As my VICE colleague, Bettina Makalintal, pointed out around Thanksgiving in an incisive tweet, the now widespread “situation of being unable to see your family for unfair reasons beyond your control is simply regular life for so many immigrants and people in diaspora.” 

The same is true for people with jobs with inflexible schedules, people who find time with their relatives traumatic rather than comforting, and anyone who simply lives way too far away to justify a very expensive flight home for a few days during the busiest (read: costliest) travel days of the year. So as folks (freaking hopefully) buckledown for a distanced, delayed, or semi-lonely holiday, VICE talked to those who’ve done it many times before to get their advice and wisdom. 

The feeling of homesickness is described in literally the Old Testament, and was even introduced into medical literature in the 17th century. Which is to say: it’s a painful part of the human experience, especially if you’re living in a place that is culturally very different from where you grew up. 

Applying a salve to homesickness can look like a lot of different things—talking and reminiscing with friends from back home, making food you ate growing up, etc.—but Adrian Ramos, 32, told VICE that he cures his own feelings of painful nostalgia by immersing himself in Puerto Rican music and film. Ramos grew up in Puerto Rico but has lived away from his family for nine years, and, due to working retail jobs that require putting in shifts over the holidays, has never been able to travel home for them. 

“This year specifically I’ve been very connected with music, film, all forms of entertainment that’s Puerto Rican,” Ramos said. “I watch and listen to it and become more proud of my home; I love seeing someone from Puerto Rico achieve success. I’m Latino, but [in Los Angeles], there’s barely any Puerto Rican presence. There’s a huge cultural disconnect, and I become closer to my home through its art. I love my culture more now than when I lived there.” 

Ramos said that, in particular, listening to a lot of Bad Bunny this year has helped him feel closer to home. “I’m a huge Bad Bunny fan,” he said. “Throughout COVID, seeing him have such a good year, it’s like, Wow, someone from my island is having a great experience.”

In a much smaller way, when I’ve been homesick for Texas in New York, I stream hours of King of the Hill and Marfa Public Radio. A not-bad way to spend the holiday season would be finding the cultural thing from your own home that provides comfort and feels nice, whether that’s Latin trap music, Bobby Hill, or long, slow pans of cornfields in the midwest. 

Erin Beattie, 24, is used to spending the holidays away from family, staying instead with her partner in Seattle rather than going home to Colorado Springs. A significant rift in her family several years ago put a bad taste around the holidays for Beattie, and she’s spent the time since practicing ways to self-soothe and celebrate without digging up old trauma. This year, due to the pandemic, she is going to be completely alone for the first time in her life. 

“I always try to do things for myself on those days, like last year, I went snow-shoeing with a friend on Thanksgiving,” Beattie said. “Being out in nature and gaining perspective during that time was really healing. This year, I knew I was going to be alone for Christmas so I’m going to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day in a cabin by myself. It’s actually the first week of 2020 I’m going to be alone, because I’ve been quarantined with my partner the whole year.” 

Everyone is, at this point, extremely sick of their own living spaces. Getting out of town is not necessarily safe or feasible, but getting out into nature—even if it’s just a nearby park where you can’t hear any cars—is a nice way to feel small in a good way, and feel a smidgen of reverence for our fucked up little world. All healing things. 

One nice (??) trait of the pandemic holiday season is that we are all dealing with it. There’s no reason for you to carry around this sad feeling alone. 

Stas Chirkov, 32, told VICE he’s offered himself to friends as a person to talk to about spending holidays away from home and family, something he’s been doing for more than 10 years, and not by choice. Chirkov immigrated from Siberia more than 10 years ago, when he cameto the United States seeking asylum as Russia was persecuting gay men and other LGBT citizens.

“When you do that, you’re not allowed to go back to the country you’re seeking asylum from,” he said. “So I had to come to peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to go back to visit for some time. With the immigration system, that turned out to be a very lengthy process. I thought it was going to be five years; it turned out to be a good 10 years.” 

Chirkov’s holiday season this year is particularly difficult; after gaining citizenship in the United States this year, he was finally going to be able to get home to Serbia for the first time since immigrating. But the pandemic, of course, makes the logistics of the extremely long journey home dangerous and impossible, so he’s staying put in LA. 

“I feel like I can relate to [missing home over the holidays], and if somebody needs to call me on Christmas, I’m here; let’s open a bottle of wine together over FaceTime, because we’re all in this together,” Chirkov said. 

There is literally no reason for you to shoulder all of the bad feelings of your solitary holiday season alone! Whether you have a friend like Chirkov who’s been there, done that, and can offer advice, or you just turn to friends who are similarly homesick this year, knowing you aren’t alone even if you’re technically alone will help. If you’re wondering who to ask to talk to or FaceTime with, look to the friends who are posting about being homesick, or being stuck in such-and-such place over the holidays—they’re likely to share in your plight, and be someone to commiserate and cope with. 

It’s extremely simple, but another way Ramos has stayed close to family while living far away during the pandemic is being vigilant about FaceTiming, and occasionally adjusting to his family’s timezone (Puerto Rico is four hours ahead of LA). “Very recently, I sent my sister a birthday gift and I told her, ‘The moment you get it, call me, no matter the time here,’” he said. 

S. Bear Bergman recently wrote for VICE about the unanticipated joys of holding a virtual Passover seder over FaceTime. “Seeing everyone’s faces, even pixelated, was so nice,” Bergman wrote. “Not only did I indeed feel connected, being virtual meant we could invite people to participate who would otherwise have been geographically impossible, and that was actually lovely.” 

Ramos similarly recommends sitting down and eating together over FaceTime, even if you’ve been falsely conditioned to believe this is “rude” or “uncouth.” Maybe this is the case for work Zooms, but your family is not going to ditch you for getting spinach stuck in your teeth for a full hour. There may be a gentle owning, but that’s what spending time with family is all about. And take a note from Bergman, and use the flexibility of virtual connection to bring in people who may not otherwise be able to join. The rules are out this year, and there are ways to use that to your slight advantage, with a little bit of planning and creativity. 

If the thought of watching Grandma and Grandpa’s chins bob around while they slowly peel tape off of boxes makes you cry, maybe don’t do that? Keeping in mind that the state of things is temporary, and, in time, we will go back to something resembling “normal,” this is not a bad year to try your hand at creating your own holiday traditions. 

Amanda Waters, 28, has spent every holiday for the past six years in Oregon, unable to get back home to Colorado because working in hair salons means limited freedom to create her own schedule. She told VICE that her first holiday away from home was difficult, but instead of going HAM and recreating all her childhood traditions, she and her partner did their own small, very casual thing. 

“I don’t think we even really decorated, we just bought some presents, and called my family,” Waters said. 

Maybe your holiday season looks like Waters’s, and it’ll feel like a relief to have a calm, no-screaming-in-the-kitchen day. Or maybe you have already gone extremely all-out and are living in basically the North Pole, while your dad’s house remains undecorated. A nice part of being a grownup is deciding which parts of your childhood you want to preserve, and which parts you are ready to ditch. This is a good year to take stock of all that, and take a swing—whether it’s your first time or fifth—at molding a set of traditions that feel just for you. It’s corny? Yes. But this season is pure corn!

Chirkov emphasized this point—that it’s normal to feel sad and a little awful about not getting to hug and spend time with family, and ignoring those sad feelings does not make them magically disappear. (Therapists everywhere would be out of work if this were true.) 

“I recognize that, if it’s the first time someone is away from home for the holidays, it must be very difficult, because the first few years were very difficult for me,” Chirkov said. “It’s normal to feel that way. You have to talk about it, and find ways to cope with it.”

Commiserate with friends, create new traditions, cry a little, channel a lonesome artist in in a cabin in the woods, eat an entire cake—whatever! It’s your holiday season to do with what you plase, as long as “what you please” is not driving cross country, flying on a plane, or spending time indoors with people who are not in your pandemic household. Things are gonna get normal again. This holiday season might never be one you look back on fondly—this year has been inordinately shitty, moreso for some than for others—but it is temporary, and there’s some good in that.

Follow Hannah Smothers on Twitter.