A few ppl have reacted to comments urging no travel/gathering over the holidays by saying they felt people saying these things were indifferent to the consequences of not traveling or were enjoying others' feelings of loss. I am team "don't travel/gather" so this gave me pause.

Am I taking perverse pleasure saying don't travel/gather? Is anyone else I have seen doing this? I don't think so. I think we aren't all equally burdened by the restrictions but everyone is burdened to some degree. What, then, makes it seem like the "don't travel or gather" folks

enjoy raining on everyone's parade or are indifferent to the costs?

I think a lot of people are unsettled to be confronted w some of the stuff holidays stir up. Below are a few semi-linked thoughts on this. I am not speaking as a political theorist and my thoughts are still

evolving so I might be wrong about all of this.

1. We don't all value the same holidays in the same way or understand others' experience of holidays & we do not talk much about aspects of this. No one who has questioned my sensitivity to the costs of skipping holiday travel

has take time to mention that Jews have already missed an entire year's worth of in-person major holidays. More to the point, few people seem to recognize that it is hard for religious minorities to spend their holidays together *every year * because they are not bank holidays.

This is true for many ppl besides religious minorities. Try spending the holidays w family “back home” while undocumented or as a refugee or too poor/overworked to travel. There is a lot privilege to having a whole calendar & society organized around your priorities & holy days.

Some folks are being hit by the fact that a lot of people suddenly care about a thing that they face every year. This may sound like indifference but it is not. It is inurement. To be devastated would undo emotion work they performed to cope with missing holidays every year.

2. Related to point 1: people do not all value holiday gatherings the same way or value them at all. That is hard for others to digest. Some think we should value the same holidays (a subset of those folks insist that Thanksgiving and Xmas can be secular for

non Xians even though this is not true for all non-Xians.) But, overall, there is a widely held expectation of deference to the idea of a holiday. Departing from that is unsettling. It is ok to expect people value some holy day. It is not ok to expect people to not have them.

While non-holiday havers may not be indifferent to the feelings of holiday-havers they probably are not deferential enough to the expectations of holiday-havers to satisfy holiday-havers.

3. For some, holiday gatherings are sites where conflicts over power intersect w very sensitive parts of our psyches. I know too many families for which the location, menu, & other plans, as well as more serious conflicts (eg having to be in the closet, bullying, sexual abuse)

are annual power struggles that are usually won by the same people. As if that weren’t enough, it is difficult to explain to people that living in a society where it is transgressive to question the goodness of holiday gatherings makes these conflicts harder and worse.

Some suffer in relative silence. Others are miserable because society insists that holidays are joyful. They do not have the emotional space to recognize and articulate how hard a time they are having because creating that space would come at a high

cost to the large number of holiday-havers described above in #2, who expect deference. Some people invested in treating the dark side of holidays as highly exceptional are the people winning these power struggles. Winners write the history.

And some are people not winning those conflicts who have been so successfully gaslit that it would just make things worse to acknowledge that the holidays hurt.They need to think that the holidays are, on balance, good bc they are stuck with them.

4. Holidays are costly. They consume huge amounts of money, time, & energy. The ratio of time and energy spent preparing and traveling for a holiday to actual run-time of the event is high.

Some would never measure this way. It's a precious experience. To others, saying "there isn't a lot of there there" would just be too transgressive. And some find it problematic but are powerless to do anything about it (see above #3).

For years I have watched one family I know go through an annual dance in which everyone talks about how much the matriarch loves Thanksgiving and Xmas dinners. Reader, she does not love Thanksgiving and Xmas dinners.

She hates them. They are too much work & she doesn’t enjoy all of the people who come, including one of her own kids. How do I know? A few years ago she started leaving the state on the holidays. Also, she told us she hated them but no one listened bc it was uncomfortable

to think that she didn’t enjoy doing the work all that work for them or enjoy their company. And, no one wanted to fully catalog the whole list of tasks, let alone talk about why women do so much of it.

(If you came here to tell me that in your house men cook dinner or do dishes please instead go clean the whole house & make up all the guest beds. Then strip them, do the laundry, & fold it. The second shift is real even if you are an egalitarian hero or non-conforming.)

What I take away from this is that some people are not just very confident that truly serious doubt about the place of holidays is the exception not the rule. They are invested in this being true.

So it is almost offensive to confront a state of mind produced by different lived experiences. It sounds like indifference or schadenfreude though it is not.

I think it's actually a complex form of inurement to either rarely having holidays or to holidays being complicated.

How do I feel? I am gutted for people who have not seen their loved ones for a long time, esp if this means not seeing ppl who are near the end of their lives or facing long term distance (eg military deployment or deportation). I think about this all the time.

I also worry terribly about people who are truly alone in this world.

And I do not feel pleasure or even indifference about anyone else's holidays. Not at all. It's just not a very new or surprising experience for a lot of us.

PS we'll still be here after the arrival of a vaccine means Thanksgiving and Xmas gatherings are possible again.