Family
How to Honor a Lost Loved One During the Holidays While Keeping Your Favorite Traditions Alive
Experts share meaningful ways to honor a loved one, navigate family disagreements and keep holiday traditions alive.
The first December without your parent can make every string of lights feel like a question. Who carves the turkey now? Who starts baking two weeks early, insists on the same old movie or hangs the ornaments in a very particular order? When the person who held the holidays together is gone, the traditions they built can feel less like comfort and more like weight.
You may feel caught between two bad options. Cancel the whole season, or push through as if nothing has changed. Grief experts say there is a third way, one that lets you keep what still feels like love while gently setting down what hurts too much this year.
Why holiday grief changes the season
Grief doesn’t follow a calendar, and no two people in a family will feel this December the same way. Some relatives will want everything exactly as it was. Others may want to skip the gathering entirely. Both reactions are normal, and both can share the same house.
Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, grief expert and senior berea...