When the Lights Are Too Bright: Mental Health in the Season of Joy

Reading Time: 4min

The Season That Asks Too Much

By the second week of December, the world begins to instruct you on how to feel. There are lights strung across streets that have not learned how to be kind. There is music in supermarkets insisting on joy while you are trying to count coins. There are greetings ("Merry Christmas!") thrown at you like assumptions. There is an expectation, unspoken but firm, that whatever grief you are carrying must wait its turn until January. Christmas is not only a holiday. It is a performance.

You are expected to arrive smiling, grateful, healed, or at least convincingly pretending. Depression, we are told gently, can take a break. Loneliness should make room for togetherness. Grief, if it must exist, should be tasteful, quiet, brief.

But grief does not understand calendars. Depression does not respond to fairy lights. Loneliness does not dissolve because there are people nearby.

For many, Christmas does not amplify joy; it amplifies absence. Empty chairs become louder. Silence becomes more deliberate. Memories return sharpened by ritual: This is where they used to sit. This is how it used to be.

And yet, society insists: Be thankful. Others have it worse. At least you are alive.

This insistence is not harmless. It teaches people to hide, to swallow pain, to believe they are failing at joy.

There is something deeply cruel about asking people to “cheer up” during a season that already exposes their wounds. Because the truth is, joy is easier when life is stable. Celebration is lighter when your body feels safe. Gratitude flows more freely when your mind is not at war with itself. Christmas, for many, arrives when finances are tight, when families are complicated, when estrangement feels final. It arrives in hospital wards, in mourning homes, in single rooms where no one is coming.

Mental health struggles spike during the holidays not because people are weak, but because pressure increases while support remains shallow. Expectations multiply, but care does not deepen. We decorate symptoms without addressing causes.

And still, we ask people to be thankful. Gratitude, when demanded, becomes another burden. It suggests that pain is a moral failure, that joy is something you earn by having the right attitude, that sadness is evidence of ingratitude rather than a response to lived reality.

But emotions are not moral achievements. They are information. What would it mean to let Christmas be emotionally honest?

And so people perform. They laugh harder. They attend gatherings they are not ready for. They post photographs that do not match their inner lives. They force themselves into cheerfulness because sadness feels like a personal failure during December.

But mental health does not improve through pretending. The rituals that once brought comfort now reopen wounds. You remember who used to be here, who should have been here, who will never be here again. And yet, the dominant cultural language offers no space for this reality. We say things like, "Count your blessings."

In fact, the pressure to perform happiness often worsens depression and anxiety. It creates a second wound: not only am I hurting, but I am hurting incorrectly.

We rarely say this out loud, but Christmas can be emotionally unsafe. It rewards those who can participate fully and invisibilizes those who cannot. It centers family without acknowledging that family can be a source of harm. It celebrates abundance without reckoning with scarcity.

What would it mean to let Christmas be quieter? What if we allowed people to show up as they are, not festive, not fixed, not grateful enough? What if we made room for sadness without treating it as an inconvenience?

Mental health during Christmas is not about forcing joy. It is about permission. Permission to rest. Permission to decline invitations without explanation. Permission to feel grief without apologizing. Permission to survive the season rather than "enjoy" it.

We do not need more motivational slogans in December. We need honesty. We need gentler expectations. We need language that does not shame pain.

And most of all, we need to remember that no one owes joy to a holiday. Christmas will come and go. But the people among us, hurting, quiet, unseen, will remain. How we treat them during the loudest season of the year says more about us than any celebration ever could.