I did something drastic for the sake of my mental health this week.

I stayed home for Thanksgiving while the rest of my family went to my in-laws’ like we’ve done for the last…I don’t know, ten years or so? Long enough for me to mark it down as what we “always” do, because for the last seven years at least, I’ve had no family on my side to figure out correlating plans with. So that’s the default. Along with that, my default has been to bury my grief and pain about all I’ve lost, year after year, holiday after holiday. But it has reached a point where it won’t stay buried, and I needed to take this time, yes, during a holiday, to let myself feel my feelings and try to really process them. In doing so, the hope is to therefore be more present for myself and my loved ones, in a safer and healthier headspace.

Earlier today I tried writing a post about all this, emphasizing the fact that I was alone today and trying to pull out those feelings of being alone, literally and metaphysically and emotionally. And then I stopped writing. And then I pulled it back up later on, and deleted it. Because as valid as all of that may be, it isn’t what will help me process my pain. In order to process what I’ve lost, I need to be able to let myself see it. I can’t focus on being alone for that. I need to focus on what it was like when I wasn’t alone.

So, in no particular order, good, bad, ugly, benign, all of it: let’s give this a shot. Here is some stuff across the first thirty years of my life that, for all intents and purposes this week, is worth remembering.

Our earliest Christmases were warm and bright. The house was full of good food, and people wanted to be there. …later Christmases, not so much.

Same could be said for any other holidays as well, I suppose.

In hindsight, holidays were always performative, but in the beginning, maybe less so.

My brother and I fought like cats and dogs during 96 percent of the year. But the remaining 4 percent, for holidays, we were able to figure out how to enjoy the magic of the holidays together with minimal bickering. Maybe that was the real magic.

As a young adult, I started making eggplant parmesan for every holiday that would feature a ham as the main component of the meal, because I’d stopped eating it at 16, much to the amusement of my mother and stepfather who fondly remembered my love of the stuff when I was younger, and made fun of my choice to abstain. It isn’t the same as deadnaming a trans relative, but, I wonder if it’s a much much lower rung on the same ladder of family dysfunction.

My mother always insisted on opening presents in front of everyone, for birthdays and at Christmastime. When it was just my brother and I, this wasn’t a big deal. When you added stepfamily into the mix later, it became a way for her to show off how much of a good mother she was to us by making sure we had particularly special presents that she could rub in their faces. I absolutely hated it.

When we had holidays at my grandparents’ house, my cousin and brother and I used to put on little plays or performances. I remember going into one of the bedrooms to plan it all out before performing for the adults in the living room. I still have a photo or two of us performing the “Pickle Tango” one Passover when I was about seven or so.

I remember always dressing up for holidays. Fancy dresses, tights, nice shoes, even a nicer than usual coat sometimes. That sort of thing used to be really important; it doesn’t seem so important nowadays, just in the world in general. Or maybe it’s just not so important to my in-laws. And that’s okay. But, I kind of miss that.

I miss Easter egg hunts. There. I said it.

Also, I miss Christmas lights. I could get lost in time and space with them. I used to like laying underneath the Christmas tree to stare up at the lights and find a little peace amid the chaos. It didn’t feel so chaotic then, if only for a moment. As a family at Christmastime, we would drive around different neighborhoods to see the decorated houses. And anytime we passed a house which had blinking lights, we would sing a little jazzy melody as if to sing along to the rhythm of the lights.

My mother loved Christmas with a zealous passion that bordered on obsession. Not Jesus. Just Christmas. And my father loved Halloween just as much.

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was always a crucial part of our Thanksgiving. Growing up, my brother and I would watch, and we would call in my mother from the kitchen when the Rockettes would perform or when celebrities she liked were appearing. The Parade was required viewing; we knew better than to argue with our mother about it, and accepted it as canon that this is what one did on Thanksgiving morning. I didn’t know until I started going to my in-laws’ for the holiday that not everyone was an ardent parade-watcher. Knowing how I am about anything relating to Boston, I have a better understanding of the homesickness and nostalgia that my mother probably felt in watching the Parade and connecting to her NYC roots in this way.

When my brother was young, he had a really hard time understanding that we don’t blow out the candles on the menorah during Hanukkah. We would sing the blessings and light the candles, and we’d have to block him from blowing them out afterwards. It took him a few years, but he got it eventually.

My grandmother had a ceramic turkey lollipop holder. At the top of the back row of feathers were little holes in which you inserted lollipops, making it look like he had lollipop feathers. I wish I had that thing. I’ve tried to find one online but the internet doesn’t seem to know what I’m talking about.

When I was very very little, my grandmother bought individual ice cream turkeys from Carvel one year for Thanksgiving. I loved them. The following year, she bought them again, and I reportedly squealed excitedly and said, “Oh, Grandma, you saved them!” Well, a tradition was born. Every year she would buy those ice cream turkeys and every year we would joke that she saved them for us from the previous Thanksgiving. That tradition, I found out later, is even older than me; my great-grandmother used to buy those same turkeys for my father and aunt. When my parents split up and my mother moved us away, that tradition stopped (along with many others). There wasn’t a Carvel where we ended up. But, there is Carvel where I live now, and so I’ve reignited this tradition with my daughter. She loves it, and so do I.

For most of my life, I’ve preferred green grapes to red ones. This is because when I was little, I bit into what I expected was a harmless red seedless grape at my grandmother’s house during some holiday, and it turned out not to be seedless. I bit down hard into a pit. I felt so betrayed that I refused to eat red grapes for decades afterward, and my grandmother would always bring green grapes to every holiday for me. I don’t know if she or my mother ever knew why they had to be the green ones, beyond thinking that I simply liked them better. Oh, the trauma!

Things I remember watching during holidays with my grandfather (and sometimes other people): Wheel of Fortune, the Red Sox, Jeopardy!, the Red Sox, Indiana Jones movies (I was way too young for Raiders of the Lost Ark and it scarred me for life), the Red Sox, All in the Family, and the Red Sox. Just to name a few. I particularly remember the rough fabric of our grey sectional couch and snuggling with him on the part that had the recliner/footrest. He always smelled like pipe tobacco, even long after he quit smoking.

One holiday season, my mother had brought home a Dalmatian that she’d found near her office, poor thing was lost. I think her name was Diamond. She was sweet, but seemed huge to me, and she had so much energy. She’d bound around the living room in big leaps and I remember worrying that she’d knock over the Christmas tree.

When I first told my mother I was formally converting to Judaism, she was at least outwardly supportive. But she had a full-on tantrum, complete with storming into her bedroom and slamming the door, when I told her that I wouldn’t be taking her dozens of bins full of Christmas decorations when the time came for her to pass them on.

Both of my grandparents died in Novembers, my grandmother on the 6th and my grandfather during Thanksgiving week. My father died in April, either right before or during Passover. Those times of year are always hard for me and happen to coincide with times when I’m expected to be plucky and festive around other people. So, that’s fucking hard. You can also add in there that my brother’s birthday is always near and sometimes on Thanksgiving (he turned 39 yesterday, though now I wonder how far gone he is and whether he even knows that).

Is there more to remember? Sure, probably. But for someone who finds it difficult to literally remember — not emotionally hard, but actually logistically problematic to do — because I bury or block out so much in order to function, this is a pretty good start all around.

I think I’m starting to learn that there are things worth remembering, because there are people and times inside my head that are worth remembering. And, perhaps more to the point, I am worth remembering too.