Managing Social Angst This Holiday Season
How to Handle Idealizing or Devaluing Holiday Social Gatherings (Vol. 5; Issue 47)
December’s arrival, with its predictably dark winter days, also brings emotional storms. A major one surrounds the inevitable disappointment when expectations for encounters with family and friends fall short. This familiar source of wintry pain emerges from two human universals—our capacity for anticipation and our desire for love.
It’s not that holiday social encounters are inherently frustrating. The pain results from the ways we anticipate these meetups. And, sadly, our advance expectations are immensely influenced by the advertising industry.
Thanksgiving just passed. And yet, already, we become immersed in nearly overwhelming, idealized images of the other upcoming holidays. We hear holiday music blaring through loudspeakers while walking city streets; suburban areas are awash with joyfully decorated houses and apartment buildings; advertisements from televisions, computers, billboards and businesses broadcast expectations of holiday bliss, of families gathered around turkeys, of friends laughing uproariously at pubs.
These stimuli ensure that we cannot help but anticipate love-filled social gatherings. However, these accelerations of our imaginations, these fantasies, are just that:
Fantasies.
They risk creating disappointment because they stray far from however our times with family and friends will actually unfold.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1974) uses the phrase, object a, to explain the intriguing role that anticipation plays in our lives. One of the scholars who best explains Lacan’s oft-obscure ideas, Todd McGowan (2025), writes:
While the object of desire might be any ordinary object, the object a gives that ordinary object an extraordinary quality that makes it desirable. Without the object a — which infuses the real-life object with an intimation of exceptionality, even of sublimity — the latter would remain just one among a heap of indifferent objects. (pp. 110-111)
The object a is what makes the anticipation so enticing. It is a special something, difficult to precisely define, that intrigues us. We want to chase it, obtain it, own it, and yet we never really can. Why? Because life occurs in ways that never quite match up with what we imagine it will be.
The economist George Loewenstein (1987) scientifically studied the idea of “anticipation” by asking participants to imagine being able to get a guilt-free kiss from a celebrity of their choice. They then had to report how much they’d pay for the smooch and how long they’d prefer to wait for it. They could get the kiss immediately, after one day, two days, one year, or ten years. Loewenstein’s subjects were willing to pay the most for a kiss that was three days away.
Why wouldn’t they want the kiss immediately?
Because they wanted to enjoy the fantasy of the kiss (for three days, anyway).
Jumping back to psychoanalysis, McGowan uses gift wrapping as an analogy for that mysterious object a. Without that decorative material, an item is ordinary. It becomes a thing one might exchange for another, as people often do. McGowan adds:
But the wrapping paper adds something special to the object’s ordinariness, making it a site that draws the subject’s desire*. If one laid out unwrapped presents under a Christmas tree, they would not attract the desire of children in the way that the wrapped ones do. (p. 111)
His analogy helps understand the power of the advertising agencies hired by major corporations to manipulate us. They tempt us with versions of the object a. The Jaguar you desire not only looks sleek and goes from 0 to 60 mph in two seconds, it also comes with beautiful looking people in the seats. Not a single one of them has a gray hair. They all happen to be in exceptionally good shape.
Part of the power of these ads lies in the influence of the unconscious mind. Even though one might dismiss the people driving in the Jag as ridiculous, it almost certainly grabs us unconsciously. It provides the sweetener, the allure, the object a.
Regarding our anticipation of Christmas dinners, office parties, drinks with friends and all the variations of same, anticipation serves as a kind of bizarre mental wrapping paper. In truth, encounters with “others” are almost always fraught. We crave being “seen” or really “known” by another. However, it is impossible to be completely known.
The conundrum is best captured by a quip from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1965), one I often cite in these essays:
It s a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found. (p. 186)
We wish to be understood, and yet we fear the risks associated with opening ourselves up.
No wonder so many resort to hiding.
Anticipating holiday social gatherings falls into two general categories, each with a similar peril. We might dread the office party, thereby lowering our expectations of it. Or, we might anxiously look forward to it, thereby setting us up for disappointment. Because we apparently need wrapping paper for life events, such anticipatory imagery is unavoidable.
We humans are, therefore, left with an unsolvable paradox when it comes to these images-of-the-future. On the one hand, they call for the kind of detachment and “living in the moment” promoted by the Stoics and the Buddhists. That way, we take what we get. We remain open and curious. On the other hand, we cannot not use our imaginations when thinking about holiday gatherings or any future event. We must anticipate. The best we can do, it seems, is to bring our awareness to these processes. That way, at least we can lessen the impact of this one source of holiday blues.
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*The “subject’s desire” refers to our basic motivations for life, most of which reside in our unconscious minds.
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References
Lacan, J. (1974). Seminar XXI: The Non-Duped Err. (Unpublished transcription).
Loewenstein, G. (1987). Anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption. The Economic Journal, 97(387), 666–684.
McGowan, T. (2025). The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan. London: Cambridge University Press.
Winnicott, D. (1965/1990). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. New York: Routledge.