For years, ahead of family holiday gatherings, Alicia Dudley would wake up anxious. Since she’d gotten married, her relatives and her husband’s had wanted them at multiple different celebrations for each occasion. Bundling up her small child and toting him about was a pain. Dudley, a creative director in Virginia, couldn’t believe that on her rare, precious days off, she was doing what she always did: running around.
Eventually, she made a simple but major decision—she quit the holidays. And now, when she texts friends around this time of year, asking how they’re holding up, she remembers why she made this choice. “It’s like, sad emoji, crying emoji,” she told me. “You know, Mom’s fighting with so-and-so. It’s chaos.” Meanwhile, she’s curled up on the couch, dog in her lap, watching junky TV.
Hypothetically, any adult in the year 2024 can do the same. They can decline party invites and hunker down for a movie marathon, or book a solo trip to Oslo, or just put in a normal day’s work and stash the calendar in a drawer. They might have a serious reason for doing so: Maybe they’re queer and their relatives don’t accept it, or they’re trying to stay sober and the drinks will be flowing from 3 p.m. on. But the motivation to skip could also be more mundane. For many people, it’s all of the expectations: traveling, bringing gifts, cooking an elaborate meal, putting on a constant cheery face. They’d rather just have some peace.
The problem is that opting out involves ditching those who are dutifully observing: probably people you care about on some level, people you might not get to see very often or at any point outside this event. What one person calls “honoring boundaries” could sound selfish to another. The point of holidays arguably isn’t just to enjoy them; it’s to connect with loved ones, even if that process can be onerous. I spoke with ethicists, an etiquette expert, and a few holiday quitters about whether such a resignation is warranted—and I came away thinking that perhaps more people should drop out of the holidays, or at least spend them how they want to. But that means they have a responsibility to create new rituals, ones that they—and their family—can all enjoy.
About 15 years ago, Kristine Conway, a leadership-development coach in Texas, had a realization: Christmas wasn’t fun. She has three siblings who all have children, and the whole gang—with all of the in-laws, all of the kids—would get together at her mom’s house. She was buying gifts for 20 to 30 people, and given that she didn’t know many of them all that well, she feared that some of her purchases would “end up in a garage sale,” she told me. It felt like the same group conversations happened each time. Everyone seemed to be following a script—but it wasn’t clear that it was one that anyone wanted to follow.
When Conway and Dudley told their respective families that they weren’t coming to their annual gatherings, they began a tradition of almost comically low-key holidays. Dudley started using Thanksgiving for all of the things she wanted to do but couldn’t during her busy weeks: sleeping in; listening to a good playlist; having a cozy, easy dinner with her husband and son. (This year, they ordered from Cracker Barrel.) Conway spent her extra free time on chores: organizing CDs or cleaning out computer files.
But deciding to take a chill solo holiday can have consequences—including hurting the people who are attending. For years, Dudley and Conway both had relatives calling, trying to understand their absence; Dudley said hers were always asking, “Why aren’t they here? Do they not like us? Are they mad?” Family relationships, as much as we like to think of them as unconditional, do need to be nurtured; damage to them isn’t always easy to repair.
However annoyed you get around the holidays, that damage might matter not just to others but also to you. Family members can give you particular rewards that others might not: Perhaps they’ve watched you grow up, and without them, you’d lose a connection to your past self. Or maybe they know what it’s like to come from your clan, and because of that, the world feels a little less lonely. Simon Keller, a philosopher at the Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, told me that people often talk about familial obligations—for instance, about what you owe your parents, given that they took care of you when you were young. But he prefers to think instead about benefits. Perhaps the choice, he told me, is not between doing what’s right for you and what’s right for your family, but rather what’s right for you in the short term—avoiding stress—and what’s right for you in the long term: nurturing relationships that, however difficult, are still meaningful. The time we have to enjoy these benefits is limited; Dudley was reminded of this when, a couple of years ago, her husband’s father died. He was one of the people for whom it had been so important to have everyone together.
And yet, the holidays aren’t the only opportunities to connect with kin. Putting too much pressure on one special occasion is part of what makes it stressful in the first place. If anything, the holiday quitters I spoke with had been pushed to find more thoughtful, more intimate ways to spend time with family: doing activities that they actually all enjoyed, sharing quieter moments one-on-one or in smaller groups. When Conway dropped out, she also started taking loved ones on special little trips sometime around (but not on) Christmas. She didn’t feel so guilty for being a no-show to the big-group affairs, given that she’d already taken her parents to see The Nutcracker at the Bass Performance Hall, in Fort Worth, or treated them to a nice dinner. Her parents have both died since, and she still looks at the pictures from those times. “I’m just really glad we did that,” she told me. She decided to continue the tradition with her daughter. They started going on vacation in December; one year, they went on a yoga retreat and wore Christmas hats on the beach.
Dudley also told me that getting together because you want to hang out, not because it’s a federally recognized occasion, can have “more weight to it.” That can still involve creating rituals: She and her brother, for instance, always get together the Sunday after Thanksgiving to play video games; their mom loves watching them enjoy what they loved as kids. And after Dudley’s father-in-law died, she and her husband started making a point to show up for her mother-in-law, especially around the holidays, knowing that she was feeling her husband’s absence acutely. But they like to just grab pizza, chat, watch a TV show—nothing fancy. “I want you to know that I care about you on a Wednesday,” Dudley said, “not just because it’s Thanksgiving.”
Attending a less-than-thrilling shindig, anyway, isn’t necessarily a noble sacrifice. Some people might stick to stressful holiday plans not just out of care for their family but because passively going along with traditions might be easier than challenging them, Samantha Brennan, a philosopher at the University of Guelph, told me; they grumpily show up as if they have no say, are present without really being present, and then feel that they’ve done their part until the next holiday. But growing up means taking some responsibility for your part in shaping family relationships. “You don’t just get to go back to being the kid in the family, where the parents tell you what to do and then you complain about it,” she said. “You’re an adult, and you negotiate with your parents the same way you negotiate with other adults.” Inevitably, families change over time, and their routines change with them: Kids get older; spouses get divorced; people die; the ones left start finding partners or having children or bringing along new friends. Everyone’s interests and priorities evolve. The task as that happens, Brennan thinks, is to “craft something that suits the needs of the people who are there now as they are now.”
That might mean going to the family gathering after all—but bucking some of the supposed expectations. If staying the full length of an event sounds intense, leave early, Lisa Grotts, an etiquette expert and consultant, told me. If you don’t have time to cook, buy something ready-made. This way, you can exercise some agency while still showing up—and your attendance could mean a lot, Brennan pointed out, to guests who might be struggling even more than you are. She lives in a queer community, and some of her friends, she told me, show up to their family’s holiday parties even though homophobic relatives attend: One of the kids at those gatherings might turn out to be gay, Brennan’s friends tell her, and they want that young person to know that they’re not the only one.
If you simply don’t want to be there for the main family event, though, it’s okay to opt out entirely. Just make sure, Grotts said, that you always notify the hosts as early as possible, give a brief explanation (she suggested “I’ve had a lot going on and need some time to recharge. Thank you for thinking of me”), and offer an alternative way to connect: a phone chat, a smaller get-together, whatever you can manage.
You might be surprised to find that your family is understanding—or even relieved, if you’ve given them permission to do what they really want. In all likelihood, you weren’t the only one stressing. Dudley and Conway both told me that after the requisite grumbling about cancellations, other guests started dropping out of their families’ standard mega-gatherings, branching off into smaller celebrations that they seemed to really love. That’s the thing about thinking of kinship in terms of benefits rather than obligations, Keller told me: The framework helps you consider not what you’re supposed to do, but what everyone involved could gain. Maybe that means being together on the actual holiday or some other time; maybe it means an elaborate festivity or a low-maintenance one. Whatever your plan is, if you approach it with intention, the result can be like your family itself: imperfect, particular, and totally worthwhile.
