🧵 Thursday Thread: Can we talk about the holidays?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Winter solstice
13 min read
The article specifically mentions winter solstice as a time of illumination and reflection. Understanding the astronomical, historical, and cultural significance of this event across civilizations adds depth to the theme of holidays as thresholds and memory machines.
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Nostalgia
14 min read
The article's central theme—holidays as 'memory machines' that 'press on the past until it answers'—is essentially describing nostalgia. The psychological and neurological research on nostalgia, its evolution from being considered a disease to a beneficial emotion, would enrich readers' understanding of why holidays stir such complex feelings.
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Liminality
12 min read
The article describes holidays as 'thresholds' we step into—this is the anthropological concept of liminality. Understanding Arnold van Gennep's and Victor Turner's work on liminal spaces and rites of passage would provide fascinating context for why transitional times like holidays feel so psychologically charged.
Maybe it’s the scent—pine, cold iron, cinnamon—or the light slipping low across the afternoons. But the winter holidays have a way of stirring the sediment.
Some people feel lit from within by twinkle lights and ritual; others feel overwhelmed, lonely, jangly with expectation. Most of us feel some wild mixture: love threaded with loss, gratitude braided with dread, old stories rising like breath on cold glass.
Holidays are memory machines. They press on the past until it answers. They reveal where we’re tender, where we’re strong, where we’re still learning to belong, and where we no longer wish to be stuck.
This time of year, maybe winter solstice in particular, can also illuminate where we still yearn, where we still need, and what we no longer need. And as Maya Angelou put it, “We need much less than we think we need.” The holiday season, for all its bustle, can offer a quiet lens—showing us the small things that actually matter, the moments of wonder or strangeness or unexpected grace we carry for years.
I’m thinking, too, of James Baldwin, who wrote that “the world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” A holiday is, in its own way, a threshold. We step into it with whatever we’ve survived, whatever we dream, and the stories that shaped us and are shaping us still.
And of course, stories are what we do here.
Holiday memories—whether poignant, uproariously funny, quietly devastating, or full of unexpected tenderness—are rich fodder for creative work. The odd details, the misalignments, the charged silences, the traditions kept or broken… this is the stuff of narrative gold.
So I’d love to hear from you:
How do you feel about this season? Do you welcome it, resist it, dread it, adore it?
What holiday memories surface for you—beautiful, difficult, hilarious, strange?
And which of those memories might be tugging at the hem of a story you want to write?
Share whatever calls to you. As always, your stories—raw, unfinished, shimmering—are welcome here.
Love,
Jeannine
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