When being alone at the holidays doesn’t feel lonely

When the weather turns cold and the holidays near, Amy Phillips shops for gifts and occasionally decorates a Christmas tree.

The gifts are mostly for her pets – six dogs, two cats – and the tree, well, that’s just for herself.

Phillips, 54, has for years spent the holidays alone.

“I spend it alone by choice, but also for my own mental health,” said Phillips, who lives in Kenmore. “It’s been a good thing.”

Like many Washingtonians this holiday season, she would be alone, but not lonely.

Social media is lit up with posts of big family dinners and matching Christmas morning pajamas this time of year, but not everyone has the same vision of an ideal holiday season. For many, it’s about trading in the familiar for the intentional, personal plans for the days between late November and early January.

For some, the social and financial pressures of the holidays – the cocktail parties, the secret Santa exchanges – feel forced. Traveling hours or days to see family across the country is draining. Gift-giving is often a recipe for overspending. A recent loss of a loved one can feel especially raw, making celebrating with others unappealing.

Some people don’t have a choice but to be alone because they’re working or estranged from family.

Lots of people, though, are happily opting out.

The Seattle Times heard from readers who said it will be more than enough to have a day off work, watch football or take a long walk while enjoying the stillness of the city. One woman wants to blast off fireworks alone on New Year’s Eve. People are planning hikes, quiet afternoons reading and festive meals for one (“Being able to pick and choose exactly what I wanted to eat was refreshing,” one reader wrote about how they spent Thanksgiving. “I even bought a tiny pumpkin pie.”)

Others relish the freedom to keep their options open. “This extroverted introvert freestyles her plans every holiday with a mix of enjoying downtime by myself, and picking one to two hangouts with friends and ‘chosen’ family,” wrote one reader.

Some years, Phillips skips traditions and uses her time off to try new recipes, paint or charcoal-draw to “just kind of let my emotions out and see where it goes.” This year she’s taking a trip.

Phillips is a counseling psychologist and has relatives with serious mental illness, she said, which makes it difficult to spend time with them.

“I’ve come to terms with it, and also know that it’s not my fault … I have actually a lot of clients who have this similar type of situation, but I work with them and help them get to the point where they can handle the holidays too,” she said.

‘Somebody to hear them’

Dan Kennedy, 71, lives much of his life bearing witness to stranger passant: when people share intimate details about their lives with strangers because they know they’re unlikely to meet again.

As a grocery store cashier and self-described “people person” – he once worked as a tour bus driver and as a chauffeur – Kennedy is often on the receiving end of such personal stories.

“It’s not always easy, because you have to keep the lines moving, right?” he said. “But I’m available for that.”

Kennedy, who worked the late shift on Thanksgiving, and plans to volunteer on Christmas, has found that listening to strangers is a central part of how he experiences the holidays.

He flips pancakes every Wednesday as a volunteer for the Westside Neighbors Shelter in West Seattle, which serves breakfast and provides shelter to people without housing. “There comes a point when everything’s flipped,” he said. “When I’m not making breakfast, I try to sit around and talk with them. And so that’s how I know I’ll be spending Christmas morning.

“They need somebody to hear them … there’s something really nice about being able to provide that kind of service to people who could really use it.”

The other day, he thought about how, without family or close friends in his neighborhood, he could use someone to talk to, too.

Then, Kennedy realized how fortunate he is: “I thought, well, what friends do I have?” he said, and decided to write down a list. “Within 10 minutes, I had 30 names. Yes! I’ve got friends. Good to know. And that was eye-opening, because I’d never really thought about, OK, exactly who are my pals?”

‘More to life’

The first Christmas after his wife died, Jack Zimmerman, 79, hung lights and decorated the inside of his home on Whidbey Island. The next year, he did a little less. Last year, he scrapped conventions and booked himself a trip to Las Vegas.

“I can be around all of these people, feel safe and secure, and at the same time, I’m by myself,” he said.

Zimmerman met his wife Tracy when he was in his 30s. They bought a home with a view of Puget Sound and built a community in Coupeville, where Zimmerman worked as a probation officer and part time as a bartender and cook. In 2015, she was diagnosed with cancer, and in 2021, died at home.

Zimmerman couldn’t bear to go into the living room, where Tracy spent her last four months of life. He avoided Coupeville for at least a year because he couldn’t fathom talking to anyone he knew.

Then: “What I decided was, I needed some purpose.”

Traveling was appealing, so he bought an all-wheel drive hybrid and started calling up family members across the U.S. He visited his older brother in North Carolina, and traveled through Idaho, Salt Lake City and Yellowstone National Park. One time, he and several nephews spent three days cooking outside while holed up in a rustic ranger cabin one of them owns in Montana.

It’s “like therapy for me,” he said of his travels.

He’s now thinking about selling his home.

And this Christmas Eve, he’s again traveling to Las Vegas. He expects to watch sports, find a holiday buffet, watch medieval jousting at the Excalibur Hotel and visit The Mob Museum.

“I have this scar in my heart, but the heart is healed over, and there’s sufficient room there to get on with my life, you know?” he said. “I want to see other things and do other things. You only get one go-round.”

‘Through the roof’

For some, there’s simply no magic attached to Christmas.

“Most everything about the Christmas holiday redounds to a silliness that carries with it, like Santa with his sack of toys, a peculiar variety of menace,” said Charles Leggett, 59, a poet and professional actor in Seattle who said, aside from cooking, he’ll do “not one thing” on Dec. 25.

The consumerism, the traffic, “It’s always supposed to be about good cheer and it just sends everybody through the roof.”

Escaping the holidays felt impossible for several years – Leggett has performed in 11 productions of one of the biggest cultural signifiers of the holiday season: “A Christmas Carol.”

He’s twice starred as Ebenezer Scrooge, including ACT Theatre’s 2015 staging of the Charles Dickens classic, a role he calls a “crowning moment” in his career.

An early scene – where Scrooge is visited by the first of three spirits that help him understand how he became cold and miserly – moved Leggett by “doing what literature can do like no other art form can,” he said. “Which is talking about our lives in really beautiful and constructive ways and makes us see our lives anew.”

And yet, Leggett added: “The sentiment surrounding Christmas is also something that I tire of almost immediately,” he said. “That’s part of what makes doing that play 12 times a week very hard work.”

Leggett, who grew up in Northern California and the Midwest, has his own traditions. Years ago, his former in-laws gave him “Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen,” a book he relies on around Thanksgiving and New Year’s, holidays he often spends with friends. His early forays into jambalayas and gumbos eventually advanced to turtle soup, a Cajun delicacy that requires three days to produce the rich stock and overnighting 4 pounds of turtle from Louisiana.

He also turns to a few beloved poems, including “Christmas Tree” – James Merrill’s tree-shaped composition about impending death – and W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” which he read a few weeks ago and, “has lovely lines in it about this nameless encroaching darkness and doom.”

With a laugh, he said: “(Auden) always advised that it should be read not at Christmas, but during the dog days of February, March, when the despair of winter really takes hold.”