Christmas Blues: The Dean Martin Feeling

Written By Garrick Wareham

Grief at Christmas Time (and other cultural annual events)

Dean Martin croons and swings with a smile as he recounts feelings of loneliness and loss in his 1966 Christmas Blues. It’s quite surreal to see such a happy performer directly confess tricky feelings around the holiday of joy and cheer.

Christmas, Winter Solstice, or other world and religious winter festivals mark cultural and personal cornerstone events in our annual calendars. They are times that are commonly synonymous with being with and alongside other people. What if those other people are no longer in your life? The sensation of being alone in a crowd is not completely alien to many people, and this can settle in deeply around important personal and cultural dates (like Christmas).

In therapy, grief is a complex thing. It’s unique and personal. It can seemingly strike like a snake or settle like heavy snowfall. It can be a lurch forward in coping and a dizzying tumble backwards. Without becoming overly poetic in a search for simile and metaphor, grief changes; it looks one way today and feels another way next week. Sometimes it knocks at the door wearing a different hat, or the same outfit as yesterday, but it’s always unmistakeable; much like people that we love, perhaps that’s why it invokes such powerful feelings?

Traditions feel different, maybe plans and preparations you had have to suddenly be changed. Whether it’s death of a person, the loss of relationship, or anxiety for something bigger and more existential (environment, political situation/stability, safety), there is no rank and tier list of importance or validity of one’s grief, just the authentic sensation. Aside from the determination to somehow tie Dean Martin’s Christmas Blues into the theme of the blog, there was a couple of lines that caught my attention in the final verse.

“May all your days be merry,
Your seasons full of cheer,
But ‘til it’s January,
I’ll just go and disappear,”

It’s a line I think has a twist of tone depending on your disposition. There’s the snide and snarky reading, one of sarcasm and spite that you can infer in the use of cliché seasonal platitudes. My reading is different, the tone of the song feels like an authentic bittersweetness. I think Mr. Martin is genuine here, well wishes and joy to all, but it isn’t what he feels in himself. This is a common experience in the Grieving, as well as the desire to take ones self away from the festivities when you don’t feel like you’re authentically participating.

There’s a lot of wonderful advice out on the internet from well established charities and knowledge bases about how to cope, look after yourself, and Be at Christmas time when you’re experiencing grief. I won’t pretend to add anything new to the wealth of information out there from reputable sources.

Thinking as a therapist as well as a human being I think of principles that Yalom describes in support of why Group Therapy works, the second one: Universality. Your grief is not uniquely felt by you, you are not alone with it. It is shared and felt by others out in the world. The particulars are specific to you but the sensations, the ebbs and flows, rises and falls are among so many throughout the world, your city or town, or even your own family, friends, and household.

None of the below links are endorsements of the charities, organisations or people, however the advice in these pages may speak to you and may help. The real advice we can explicitly give is that therapy services exist to support those who need a supportive and contained space to explore and open their grief in. We are one such service amongst many.

May your 2023 be full of whatever you need it to be full of. We’ll see you in January.

Garrick Wareham

Garrick Wareham
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