COLUMN: Surviving the holiday season is all about remembering what endures after the Christmas tree has come down

And just like that, it’s December.

Perhaps your year has moved smoothly, one day peacefully giving way to another, with plenty of time to savor the good moments and recover from the bad. 

But I have a feeling you, like me, are a bit bewildered by the fact that we’re already a solid week into the final month of the year. 

Perhaps you’ve already purchased all of your Christmas gifts for family, friends and coworkers and they’re all carefully wrapped or bagged, resting beneath your tree.

I think it’s more likely that you and I are only partially done with our shopping, fighting a nagging sense that we’re forgetting something.

Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, we all know 2025 is fewer than four weeks away. The New Year brings its own pressure what were all of our favorite things in 2024? What are our goals for the next year? And can you believe its been a whole quarter-century since we were worried about Y2K?

You could be struggling with even weightier things: financial difficulties exacerbated by the gift-giving season, the pain of a lost loved one sharpened by the holidays or a battle with addiction made significantly more challenging due to the sudden change in routine.

If so, I hope this column is your reminder to slow down, take a moment, take a deep breath.

*****

That advice may seem a bit trite, the shallow moral of a thousand Hallmark movies. But I need as many reminders as I can get. 

The instinct to squeeze all the joy and heartfelt moments out of the next few weeks comes from a good place. It’s rare that we collectively decide to emphasize taking time off work to spend it with loved ones. 

And I love giving gifts. I love that it demonstrates my connection with a family member or friend, that I can in some very real, tangible way improve their lives. I’m not diminishing the importance of our holiday traditions. They’re what connect us to each other and to our past.

But it can be exhausting, the parties and shopping and travel and awkward family interactions. I think it’s good to acknowledge that.

This year, I am exhausted. It’s a good exhaustion, the result of a year of hard work. Launching a newspaper isn’t easy! I’m lucky to have a fantastic staff and strong community support. But I’m exhausted all the same. 

I can struggle with focusing too much on the next task, the next meeting, the next challenge. Part of what makes me a good editor is anticipating potential needs, weak points, failures. Extend that to every facet of my life, however, and that thinking process can be overwhelming. 

So what’s the solution? I don’t know that there is a complete fix. But when I find myself distracted and stressed by the vagaries of the future, I try to pull myself back to the present. I find something right here and now to take joy in — a hot cup of coffee, a steamy shower, the the smell of a paperback book, the yellow-green carpet of fallen Ginko tree leaves I see on my way to work.

I remind myself that, as challenging as the immediate future seems, I’ve made it this far. I’ve overcome similar challenges, I’ve survived similar seasons. During times of stress and change, I’ve discovered new depths to my own strength and resolve and I’ve built deeper and stronger friendships.

*****

Friends are the key, I think. The people who walk beside you each and every day, who hold you accountable, who celebrate your victories and mourn your losses. I’m blessed to have college friends I still talk to every day, work colleagues who make journalism a joy and friends from all walks of life who enrich my days in all sorts of small, meaningful and wonderful ways. 

There’s a voice in the back of my head that tells me I don’t deserve this love and support. Over the years, I’ve learned to ignore it. It’s a tragedy that we are often loved far more than we know, but I feel pretty loved. 

I’ll get sappy again here for a minute: making sure our friends and family know they are loved is far more important than checking off the rest of our Christmas to-do lists.

My friend Chancellor Mills died suddenly in 2016 when he was 27 and it broke my heart. Chance and I went to school together, we both worked for the school paper, and after we graduated, we both entered the journalism world. I worked for my hometown newspaper and Chance moved a couple hours south to work for the Bryan-College Station Eagle (oddly enough, the first newspaper I was ever in. But that’s a different story). 

Even after he moved away, Chance would always come back to Northeast Texas for Christmas. He insisted on meeting up with me and a few other friends and exchanging presents. They were usually some nerdy knick-knacks — a Star Wars mug, a Superman poster, those kinds of things. I don’t really remember most of them.

But I do remember how Chance made me feel: loved and valued and important. 

How we make them feel — that is what will always stick with folks.

Caleb Slinkard is the managing editor of The Macon Melody. Email him at caleb@maconmelody.com.