A photo shows the author’s Christmas cookies from a family cookie contest. 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 vacation plans.
I live in Montana with my husband and children, but I grew up in Texas. In even-numbered years, we travel the 2,000 miles to my mother and stepfather’s farm in the Lone Star State for Christmas. On odd years we spend Christmas at home with my in-laws.
The years in Montana are inevitably more relaxed. There is usually a soft blanket of snow on the ground. Avoiding travel means we have more time to read and watch our favorite movies. We don’t have to pack or worry about connecting flights and cramming our luggage into my childhood bedroom. We can enjoy our own decorations and traditions, such as a cookie contest where my sister-in-law and I irreverently decorate our cookies differently from the intended design. (A candle-shaped cookie can look quite phallic if turned on its side and decorated with flesh-colored icing, for example.)
Montana vacations are also more relaxed thanks to politics. My in-laws’ political perspective is similar to ours. However, my parents are more conservative.
For many voters, spending holidays with family was non-negotiable before Donald Trump arrived on the political scene. Now they are reassessing. Fox News host Jesse Watters complained that he was not invited to his mother’s house for Thanksgiving after the election.
In a Facebook group that I am a member ofex-evangelical Christiansseveral commenters shared these sentiments:
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“We are hunkering down with just our nuclear family for the upcoming holidays.”
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“I’m preparing to cut some people out of my life. I no longer have the strength to deal with them.”
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“I said no to Thanksgiving this year with my family. We’ll probably do something with them at Christmas, for my daughter’s sake, but we’ll just take a step back.”
I wish I had realized this was an option in 2016. Before then, I enjoyed traveling to Texas for Christmas. It was a chance to see distant loved ones, participate in my childhood traditions, and attend my childhood church’s Christmas Eve candlelight service.
But after Trump was elected the first time, I could barely talk to my family. I knew they voted for Trump because I tried to talk them out of it by showing them the ways the people they love would be hurt by his policies. I couldn’t understand how they could support someone who so clearly contradicted the teachings of Jesus: to be charitable to the poor, hospitable to the foreigner, and comforting to social outcasts.
What particularly concerned me 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 stoked. I had never before thought of my family as racist, yet they didn’t see Trump’s overt racism, sexism, and homophobia as a dealbreaker.
I had tried to explain: if they wouldn’t welcome a Muslim, an immigrant, or a gay 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 it, keeping busy with Christmas light displays and trips to the zoo, avoiding political conversations as much as possible.
But I have even less tolerance for Trump now than I did in 2016, with the garbage fire of his last term still lingering in the rearview mirror. I haven’t forgotten that his barrage of racist rhetoric led to a brutal family separation policy who tore thousands of children from the arms of their parents. I have not forgotten the way Trump has dismantled environmental protectionscausing the country to fall irrevocably behind in the fight against climate change. I have not forgotten that he installed three Supreme Court judges helped overturn Roe v. Wade. I haven’t forgotten that when he lost his re-election bid in 2020, he tried to incite a violent act takeover of our government.
Trump’s actions in his next term are likely to be even more serious. He could Deport dreamers who have spent a large part of their lives in the United States access to gender-affirming care for transgender childrenAnd stop prosecutions who try to hold him and his friends responsible.
If explained one TikTok user: “The point is, Trumpers: they told you what they’re going to do. And then you co-signed those plans when you voted on them and elected them into office. … As far as they’re concerned, you’re okay with all the things they talked about.
Brent Love is the author of “Jump,” a strange 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 a distance,” threatening to lose contact with the people who meant the most to him.
Not to spoil anything, but Love’s parents eventually changed their minds and fully accepted him, his husband, and their children.
I wanted to see Love’s perspective as someone who was once 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, no matter how many compromises you have to make.
So his advice surprised me: “Do not betray your relationship with yourself in favor of your relationship with someone else. If you can be with your family during the holidays in a way that allows you to be authentically yourself, do so. If you can’t do it, don’t do it.”
Love said to rely less on intellectual justifications for these decisions and more on how your body responds: “If my heart races, my chest contracts, and my stomach churns when I think about a certain choice, I trust my body. I am determined to take care of myself 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 decide where to spend the holidays. This year we are staying in Montana.
Phallus-shaped cookies and all.
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