Kayla Wikaryasz-News Staff Writer

The limbo period between Christmas Day and Jan. 1 is objectively, the most depressing seven days out of the year. I call it the Post-Christmas Blues. How ironic it is that a holiday that is marketed as being a joyous, and beautiful time sometimes brings the most emotional distress.

The Post-Christmas Blues can be diagnosed as the catastrophic emotional fall from the highs of the Christmas season. Weeks spent surrounded by charity, giving, beauty, excitement, and joy are quickly replaced with mundanity once the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 25.

This year, the Post-Christmas Blues hit me harder than usual.

The holidays become more depressing every year. My parents and I keep getting older and each Christmas we seem to chase the bits of luster we lost the year prior. Perhaps the holidays are just no longer as magical as they were when I was a child. My uncle always told us that Christmas was for kids. At 27, I now understand what he meant.

My parents still wrap presents for my adult brother and I and we open them in our living room like we did when we were small children. Neither of us have children or significant others so our family unit has not changed in nearly three decades.

Each year as I open presents, I feel as though I am playing a caricature of the child I once was, simultaneously grieving the innocence I once had and grieving the image I thought was going to be my current future. It is as if I am living in a feedback loop in which I keep aging but our familial traditions don’t.

There is something very unnatural about that reality which makes me very unsettled and anxious. The box to which our familial traditions have existed within, like a terrarium, has buckled under the weight of time. They have grown stale, less fulfilling, and I feel the seams of that box are disintegrating like rust.

My fear is that one holiday, there will be no box left to hold any traditions, new or old.

This is the first holiday season that I am not juggling the stress of travel or the stress of college. I am fully awake and now have a full assessment of how Christmas decorations have aged since I left home. Some decorations are weathered far beyond acceptable presentation. Some decorations are fine and others must be discarded. This reality can further be translated into a metaphor that is representative of both my year-round unsettledness and my dissatisfaction with what I call the Post-Christmas Blues.

These two distressed states have now converged, and I watch as a bystander as my peers grow their families and celebrate new traditions. I try to create new traditions with my immediate family but the roots seem to never take hold.

In March, I moved back home after my work contract ran out with Michigan State University. Simply put, I moved back home because Lansing was expensive, my college friends moved away, and I was desperately homesick. Currently, I’m back living in my childhood bedroom as I piece together my twenties after blowing it up by graduating college and foregoing an upward corporate-ladder trajectory of a career that I assumed I was embarking upon post-college.

Peers I left behind to pursue a college education, some of whom completed their college journey much earlier than I did, I now see via social media holding their new babies in front of Christmas trees like Rafiki did at the beginning of “The Lion King.” Meanwhile, I absentmindedly munch on Christmas cookies and complain about how I should read more.

While in college, I was never bothered by my peers narrating their holiday festivities via mass-photo collages on Facebook or Instagram. I was too much involved in my course load, basking in the stressfulness of exam week, or immersing myself in the hustle and bustle of a busy college campus. I was oblivious of new traditions and seasons of growth that my hometown acquaintances were building for themselves.

Upon reflection, I realize I chose to milk my academic pursuits and pursued academic validation over everything else. I got a degree and my peers got a degree and a family.

Ten years after graduating from high school, and after a non-traditional collegiate path, I hold my hands in front of me and feel as though my ambitions were misguided and the fruits of my labor are merely sand compared to the fruits from other trees that I could’ve nurtured. During a social time of collective reflection, the holiday season reminds me of the things I sacrificed to get to somewhere higher and more prestigious.

The days between Christmas and Jan. 1 have consistently felt like a purgatory-like state over the years. In my mind, if I’m not moving forward, I’m wading in quicksand, waiting to die. Therefore, perhaps the crux of my Post-Christmas Blues malady is that this purgatory state reflects my persistent feelings of stagnation since returning home.