Please Stop Posting Your Christmas Dinner Photos
The essential rules for holiday season survival should be evident by now: Avoid malls on the weekends, lest you want to risk getting crushed in a stampede. Order gifts at least three weeks in advance if you cancelled your Amazon Prime account last year. Limit your candy intake to once a week (cough, day). But as an only child coming from an incredibly small family — just me and my dad — there's one more rule I have to add to my wintertime playbook with increasing urgency: Get off social media. Between Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas, I urge myself to deactivate Facebook, I delete Instagram from my phone, and I don't even dream about checking Snapchat unless I want a video montage of reminders that I'm missing out...on everything.
For people with families like mine, the excessive stream of family dinner photos that inundates my feeds during the holiday season just feels exhausting and insensitive. The holidays are tough enough when you don't have extended family, and social media creates an added layer of FOMO-induced sadness that can hover over you. And though I'm sure nobody means to be malicious, it can feel hurtful. Think about it: If one of your close friends just called things off with her fiancé, would she be the one you gloat to over happy hour drinks over ring shopping with your partner? Probably not. That's what perusing social media feeds feels like over the holidays for someone with little or no family. Countless hashtags like #FamilyTime and #HomeForTheHolidays come from virtually everyone you know — it's not just that one friend bragging about their great relationship when you just got dumped, but the entire neighborhood chiming in. Welcome to look-what-you-don't-have central!
Don't get me wrong, social media can be great and I'm not against it, even though studies have even linked social media usage to depression. I've live-tweeted my way through The Voice like a crazy woman and done one too many Warrior IIs to a video of a setting sun. And I'm not a total grinch; sometimes, I even find the Snaps of Charades with your family laugh-out-loud funny, despite the fact I can barely play a full-blown game of Monopoly with mine.
I'm not asking for a a pity party. The holiday season always gives me even more reason to reflect on how lucky I am to have close relationships, an amazing dad, and a roof over my head — so I totally appreciate that you are also grateful for your family and that seeing them for the holidays is a special time. And I'm all for that! I also get that the curated photos of happiness, hot cocoa, and lit-up gingerbread homes that would put Rockefeller Center's tree decorations to shame aren't always so picture-perfect beneath their Valencia-filtered surface. But I can't help seeing those photos and feeling like I'm missing out on something really, really special.
And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. I've had countless friends express to me their social media-infused loneliness over the holidays. I've even found myself in semi-private yoga classes on official holidays (hey, guess there's one perk of not having family holiday plans), bonding with the one other person who showed up over how tough the holidays can be when you don't have much or any family. Same goes for those with families they're estranged from, for those whom the holidays are a particularly sad time of year thanks to recent turmoil, divorce, sickness, or the anniversary of losing a loved one, and even those with families that simply don't have many holiday traditions. I can imagine lots of reasons people feel equally ostracized and sad on social media during the holidays.
More people might be feeling what I'm feeling, as one-child America is growing: There's an estimated 20 million only-child households in the U.S. alone — and with couples waiting increasingly longer to start families, more and more children are born with already-deceased grandparents or elderly grandparents who pass away early in their childhood. Families are also increasingly cross-coastal, or even continents, and many people can't afford to go home for the holidays and be with their loved ones, which I'm sure presents a comparable sting to the one I feel. There's also an increasingly diverse definition of "family:" Many gay and lesbian couples raise their own children with modern-day fertilization techniques or adopt; technology has empowered single women to work with sperm banks and raise children as single moms; 34 percent of children today are living with an unmarried parent, the list of "nontraditional" family-types goes on and on. You may think live-streaming the evolution of your Christmas dinner table spread photo is totally innocuous (and, man, does that blackberry cobbler you made from The Four & Twenty Blackbirds cookbook look delicious), but the odds are someone you care about has a panging heart, too.
I'm not asking you to forgo social media entirely; I'm aware it's 2016. I'm just asking for judgment. A single post of your grandma's epic pumpkin cheesecake? Go for it. I'll even like it! But the pre-baking apple-peeling pie post plus 17 more photos uploaded between then and your last à la mode spoonful? That's about 17 more heart-wrenching twists of the knife than feels good. Take one person's curated collection of Christmas dinner moments and multiply that by the hundreds of people you follow on social media – it's enough OCFOMO (that's FOMO for only children) to make me feel sad all day long.
This Christmas, I beg you to think about your audience before you post that ninth family mannequin challenge. Imagine sitting alone on a yoga studio bench or a local watering hole scrolling through a stream of a big family happiness you've never known on your Christmas…eve, day, and the morning after. Sure, you may forgo a couple of Insta-likes — but I promise you'll earn an even bigger army of invisible likes instead.
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