2025-12-23, This christmas, give yourself bravery

Before beginning, I want to say that this piece is for, mostly, adult cishet white men. I understand that many folk need to lie through the Holidays for their own safety, and I don't want them to read this and get any idea that the reasons I give here are a good enough reason to put your safety on the line. But if it's not safety, and you just don't like to make noise at Christmas Dinner? Then this is for you.

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For me, Christmas Day often represents the last day people feel obligated to Holiday Cheer. After their fear prevents them from saying anything real to their family today, they will feel guilty, and resume lashing out at those with less power than them who make them uncomfortable with their complacency.

All the anger, all the pain, that gets suppressed today? It doesn't evaporate: it gets let off, bit-by-bit, Karen-style, through the year, through shitposts and other copes, that usually punch down at others in the same way the racist Uncle's jokes do, just normalized to a different context.

So, I want to start by asking y'all to give yourselves the bravery to say no to nonsense today, for my sake. If you don't, you're going to feel some impulse to balance things out through the year, and that'll mean, at some point, you're either going to say something unkindness toward me or someone else, or else spend your energy resisting that unkindness, rather than being present in care.

But, it's not just for my sake, or just for the future. Choosing bravery today, could make life better today, for you too:

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On so many forums that come across my Web feeds, I'm seeing folk post, "I spent 20 minutes watching my mother-in-law ruin my knives by trying to sharpen them, and said nothing." "My dad cracked the oven door and then called my roast dry, what did he expect?!"

These posts hypernormalize parental domination. It rarely occurs to posters that their parents are humans they could talk to ("Oh, I'm the one cooking tonight, you can watch,") and if they do acknowledge it, it's to commisserate with the audience, who is clearly in the same position.

Think of all those "Am I the only one?" posts complaining about passive-aggressive spouses, gaslighting in-laws, or friends who weaponize nostalgia. They stitch into a tapestry of hypernormalization: the casual acceptance of shitty behavior because "that's just how my family/friends/coworkers are." It becomes the norm, baked into the social fabric like those olives that your aunt insists make mashed potatoes better. (They don't.)

Hypernormalization might be a family recipe, but like most family recipes, it pretty much just serves to validate the egoes of the folk who keep making it. It lives through our unspoken anxieties, our fears of being disconnected. But in order to avoid that acute feeling of disconnection, folk have to move into a life of constant low-level disconnection: alienation.

Look. You don't have to tolerate folk ruining your roast, or rabbling for racism. Even when they're your folk. It's a bad habit, one you picked up from folk who maybe you could tell wanted to show you better. All it does is make the disconnection of daily life a little more comfortable, the false connection of being manipulated by family a lot more necessary, and any real honesty, impossible.

And it's not just about you, or your parents. There are usually kids there. Do you want to model for them that the idea that growing up will get them freedom is a lie, or do you want to demonstrate for them that freedom is something they can do for themselves whenever they're brave enough? No Boomer's commercial trash could be a better gift than showing the younger folk that if you don't give space to nonsense, you don't have to waste your energy tolerating it.

Do better. Be brave. Speak up for yourself.