A photo shows the author’s Christmas cookies from a family cookie competition. Photo Courtesy Of Tiffany Torres Williams
Before I knew the results of the 2024 presidential election, I gave myself permission to do something I’d never done before: change my holiday plans.
I live with my husband and kids in Montana, but I grew up in Texas. In even years, we travel the 1,800 miles to my mom and stepdad’s ranch in the Lone Star State for Christmas. In odd years, we spend Christmas at home with my in-laws.
The Montana years are inevitably more relaxed. There is usually a soft blanket of snow on the ground. Avoiding travel means we have more time for reading and watching our favorite movies. We don’t have to pack or deal with connecting flights and cramming our luggage into my childhood bedroom. We get to enjoy our own decorations and traditions, like a cookie-making contest in which my sister-in-law and I irreverently decorate our cookies differently than their intended design. (A candle-shaped cookie can look quite phallic when turned on its side and decorated with flesh-colored icing, for example.)
The Montana holidays are more relaxed thanks to politics, too. My in-laws’ political perspective aligns with our own. My parents, however, are more conservative.
For many voters, spending holidays with family was nonnegotiable before Donald Trump came onto the political scene. Now, they’re reassessing. Fox News host Jesse Watters complained that he wasn’t invited to his mother’s house for Thanksgiving after the election.
In a Facebook group I belong to forex-evangelical Christians, several commenters shared these sentiments:
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“We are hunkering down for the upcoming holidays to just our nuclear family.”
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“I am getting ready to cut a bunch of people out of my life. I don’t have the strength to deal with them anymore.”
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“I said no to Thanksgiving with my family this year. We will probably do a Christmas thing with them for my daughter’s sake but we are just taking a step back.”
I wish I had realized this was an option in 2016. Before then, I had enjoyed traveling to Texas for Christmas. It was a chance to see far-flung loved ones, partake in the traditions of my youth, and attend my childhood church’s candlelight Christmas Eve service.
But after Trump was elected the first time, I could barely speak to my family. I knew they had voted for Trump because I’d tried to talk them out of it, showing them the ways the people they love would be hurt by his policies. I couldn’t understand how they could support a person who so clearly contradicted the teachings of Jesus: to be charitable to the poor, welcoming to the foreigner and comforting to social outcasts.
What worried me more than anything was the way my family was animated by Trump’s dehumanization of others. I am a mixed-race Hispanic woman whose white mother and stepfather seemed unfazed by the racism Trump fomented. I’d never considered my family racist before, yet they didn’t see Trump’s overt racism, sexism and homophobia as a deal-breaker.
I had tried to explain: If they wouldn’t welcome a Muslim, an immigrant or a queer person to their table, I didn’t want to be there, either. If you easily fear people who are different, you will always be a pawn on someone else’s chessboard of hatred.
That Christmas was awkward, but we muddled through, busying ourselves with holiday light shows and trips to the zoo while avoiding political conversation as much as possible.
But I have even less tolerance for Trump now than I did in 2016, with the dumpster fire of his previous term still lingering in the rearview mirror. I haven’t forgotten that his barrage of racist rhetoric led to a brutal family separation policy that ripped thousands of children from the arms of their parents. I haven’t forgotten the way Trump dismantled environmental protections, irrevocably setting the country backward in the fight against climate change. I haven’t forgotten that he installed three Supreme Court justices who helped annihilate Roe v. Wade. I haven’t forgotten that when he lost his reelection bid in 2020, he tried to initiate a violent takeover of our government.
Trump’s actions in his next term are likely to be even graver. He could deport Dreamers who have spent much of their lives in the United States, restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender kids, and stop prosecutions that seek to hold him and his friends accountable.
As one TikTok user explained: “Here’s the thing, Trumpers — they’ve been telling you what they’re going to do. And then you cosigned on those plans when you voted for them and elected them into office. … As far as they’re concerned, you’re A-OK with all the stuff that they were talking about.”
Brent Love is the author of “Leap,” a queer memoir about leaving his conservative upbringing to live in Armenia through the Peace Corps, just days after coming out to his parents. They heartbreakingly told him that “if you decide to pursue this lifestyle, we … will have to love you from afar,” threatening loss of contact with the people who meant the most to him.
Not to spoil anything, but Love’s parents eventually had a change of heart and have wholly accepted him, his husband and their children.
I wanted Love’s perspective as someone who had once been rejected by his family. I thought he might tell me that holidays are sacred and that if family members want to be near you, you should let them, regardless of how much you might have to compromise yourself.
So his advice surprised me: “Do not betray your relationship with yourself in favor of your relationship with anyone else. If you can be with your family for the holidays in a way that allows you to be authentically yourself, do it. If you can’t, don’t.”
Love said to rely less on intellectual justifications for these decisions and more on how your body reacts: “If my heart races and my chest tightens and my stomach turns when thinking about a certain choice, I trust my body. I’m committed to taking care of me, no matter what.”
Love’s advice reminded me that sometimes we need time and distance from the people who hurt us to gain clarity. Trying to force a relationship that doesn’t feel safe into an intensely short time frame like the holidays is often a recipe for emotional disaster. It was all I needed to make my decision about where we would be spending the holidays. This year, we will be staying in Montana.
Phallus-shaped cookies and all.
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