Are You Ready for Christmas?

By Deidre Lopez

Lately, I’ve been looking at the world and wondering how much of it is actually real.

Not real in the physical sense, we can touch things or see things, but real in the way we treat it. Solid. Unquestionable. I wonder how we collectively agreed to take so many man-made systems so seriously that they now control our emotions, our choices, and our sense of worth.

We owe hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house.

But where is that money?

What is that loan, really?

We drive cars we didn’t build, powered by fuel we don’t control, paying prices that can rise overnight because someone somewhere decided they should. Phones are designed to last two years. Printers barely survive the warranty. Everything breaks just in time for you to buy it again.

And we accept it.

We stress endlessly over things we created, systems meant to make life easier that somehow made us slaves to our own lives. We gave power to people we don’t know, to structures we barely understand, and then act surprised when those systems stop serving us.

We call this freedom.

But freedom that requires constant buying, constant producing, constant proving. What kind of freedom is that?

We are exhausted not because life is inherently cruel, but because we’ve built a world that monetizes every aspect of being human. And then we blame ourselves for not keeping up.

Which brings me to Christmas.

Every year around this time, the same question appears everywhere.

Are you ready for Christmas?

Are you ready for the holidays?

And every time I hear it, I pause because I genuinely don’t know what that means.

Are you asking if I’ve bought enough presents?

Spent enough money?

Filled enough space under the tree?

Are you asking if I’ve baked enough cookies, attended enough gatherings, said Merry Christmas to enough people, donated to the right causes, dropped spare change into the red bucket with the bell?

Are you asking if I’ve done enough to prove I’m good?

Somewhere along the way, “ready” stopped meaning present and started meaning productive. Christmas became a performance. A checklist. A season where love is measured by output and worth is wrapped in paper.

If something genuinely brings you joy, connection, or meaning, keep it. There is nothing wrong with traditions, gifts, celebrations, or giving when they come from a place of truth. The moment worth pausing is when we’re doing these things to fit in, to keep up, to create an image, or to avoid what’s actually asking for our attention. Joy that is chosen freely nourishes life. Joy that is performed quietly drains it.

And we all feel it even if we don’t name it.

What we don’t talk about enough is what this season actually does to people.

The holidays are framed as joyful, but for many, they are the heaviest time of year. Depression deepens. Anxiety rises. Old wounds reopen. Sobriety is tested. Loneliness becomes louder. Not because people are broken but because the pressure is immense.

There is pressure to be happy when you’re not.

Pressure to spend money you don’t have.

Pressure to show gratitude instead of truth.

Pressure to hold it together so you don’t make anyone else uncomfortable.

For people already stretched thin, Christmas doesn’t feel like celebration it feels like a spotlight. It illuminates what’s missing: money, connection, safety, family, ease. And instead of creating softness around that reality, we layer expectation on top of it.

We’ve tied love to spending.

Worth to giving.

Belonging to participation.

So if you’re struggling financially, grieving quietly, navigating addiction or recovery, questioning your life, or simply exhausted this season can feel less like warmth and more like judgment.

And when people crack under that weight, we call it tragic.

We call it surprising.

We call it unfortunate.

But we rarely call it systemic.

We rarely ask whether a culture that demands performance from hurting humans might be part of the problem.

What’s especially strange is how generous we become on cue.

For a few weeks a year, we donate food.

We donate toys.

We donate time.

We make sure people have something… for a day.

And then we go home.

We treat homelessness and addiction like seasonal problems instead of what they actually are: a disease of our society.

We talk about “the homeless” as if they’re a separate category of humans.

We talk about “addicts” as if they’re broken individuals instead of symptoms of something deeply wrong.

Something is wrong with a society that thinks it’s acceptable for people to live on the street.

Something is wrong with a society that watches human beings inject themselves with poison and responds with distance, disgust, or paperwork.

We tell ourselves they need to “get help.”

We tell ourselves they should go somewhere else.

We tell ourselves anything that allows us to return to our warm homes without questioning the system that made this normal.

It’s easier to donate once than to admit responsibility.

Easier to feel generous than to feel implicated.

We fix potholes faster than we fix people.

We repair roads but ignore the holes in our social fabric.

We say we want to “keep our streets safe.”

What we usually mean is out of sight.

Move them to another street.

Another neighborhood.

Another city.

Another country.

But we haven’t solved the human problem.

Homelessness isn’t just a housing issue.

Addiction isn’t just a personal failure.

Loneliness isn’t just a feeling.

They are signals.

And the most uncomfortable truth is this: we are part of the system that produces them.

There’s a line I return to often:

I choose myself the way I wish the world would choose itself.

Because we forget we are not only responsible for our homes.

We are responsible for our home here on Earth.

Holidays only matter because we decided they matter.

People only “don’t matter” because we decided they don’t.

And that decision shows up everywhere.

The person sleeping in an alley.

The person crying alone in a bedroom.

The person numbing themselves with substances.

The person getting deported on a plane back to a country that was never truly home.

The person wearing Chanel who feels just as unseen as the person wearing the same shirt for three months.

Unseen feels the same no matter what you’re wearing.

Our world isn’t dying only because we’re destroying the planet… though we are.

It’s dying because we’re allowing each other to die slowly.

Quietly.

Conveniently.

Out of view.

So no, I don’t know if I’m “ready” for Christmas.

But I am ready to ask different questions.

What if generosity wasn’t seasonal?

What if compassion didn’t require a holiday?

What if love wasn’t something we turned on in December and forgot by January?

What if Christmas wasn’t about proving our goodness but confronting what we’ve normalized?

The people this is for will feel it immediately.

The rest will scroll past, busy getting ready.

And that’s okay.

But maybe—just maybe—being “ready” this year doesn’t mean buying more.

Maybe it means choosing differently.

Seeing differently.

Voting differently.

Living differently.

Remembering that every person you pass, on the street or across the table, is a human being who eats, sleeps, breathes, and hurts the same way you do.

And forgetting that truth is the most expensive thing of all.

Nothing will change if nothing changes.

And pretending we’re fine hasn’t made us well.