Navigating Holiday Grief: Tips, Rituals, and Emotional Support-🎄💔🕯️✨🤝
- charleescott
- Dec 9, 2025
- 5 min read
Key Points:
The holidays are full of memory triggers that activate grief. Familiar sights, smells, foods, songs, and traditions act as powerful memory cues.
Finding the right mental health provider matters.
Some grievers process emotionally, others process through action and problem-solving.
Ritual and ceremony can fill the gaps left by talk-based approaches.
Personal rituals, large or small, offer structure, meaning-making, and a sense of agency that many people find grounding when emotions feel overwhelming.
Rituals empower both the grieving person and those supporting them.
By Charlee Scott
The holiday season is often painted as a time of joy and celebration, but for many people living with grief, this time of year can bring a weight that clashes with the joy others seem to expect. The lights, music, and traditions that others associate with comfort instead stir up memories we aren’t prepared to face.
Nearly 40% of people living with mental health conditions report that the holidays make their symptoms “somewhat” worse, a reminder that struggling right now is far more common than we talk about [4].
If you’re moving through loss this season, whether recent or carried for years, you’re not doing it alone. You’re not broken or a Grinch. You’re human. This article explores why grief can intensify during the holidays, what we know about how people naturally cope, and how rituals, support, and the right kind of help can make this season feel a little more manageable.
The Holidays and Hidden Grief
Grief often follows the calendar. Anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, and holidays act like markers, punctuating the process. For many, these dates can be both painful and confusing. Those living with loss want to hold space for the joy of life and celebrations around them while also carrying an acute awareness of the empty seat, the gap in the rest of their lives.
The holidays are vibrant with grief triggers, family gatherings, music, the movies, and even scents. Nostalgia is part of the season, and for those coping with loss, it’s rarely a comforting presence. This time can leave many grievers overwhelmed and puzzled.
They’d felt the same loss felt just as sharply three months ago and managed to cope—so what has changed?
Grief Is a Cycle, Not a Straight Line
The Dual Process Model of bereavement can shed some light on these shifts in how grief is experienced. The model proposes two common orientations to grief.
Loss-oriented grief resembles the “traditional” view of grieving. It involves a deep yearning for the deceased, ruminating on the loss, reappraising the meaning of the death, and adjusting the relationship with the deceased now that they are gone [1]. This form of grief is intensely emotional and focuses on the events surrounding the death.
Restoration-oriented grief, on the other hand, emerges when dealing with secondary stressors related to ongoing life or the deceased [1]. These stressors may be immediate (i.e., planning a funeral) or long-term (i.e., reconsidering financial or life plans). The model also acknowledges periods of “time off” from grief, when neither orientation dominates [1].
A recent study engaged participants with lived experience to further explore and expand this model. Participants endorsed changes in the intensity, sense of control, and degree to which they felt connected to the deceased person and reality [1]. This normalizes bursts of grief around specific times of year. Interestingly, the same participants removed “time off,” stating they did not view it as possible to take time off from their grief [1].
Instead, the group believed they oscillated between loss-oriented (LO) and restoration-oriented (RO) grief, believing this creates an accumulation of learning that has helped them adapt to living with grief [1]. An example of this might be when missing someone (LO) inspires us to live in such a way that would honor them (RO).
Ultimately, grief is understood as a dynamic cycle shaped by the unique internal and external circumstances of a person’s life.
People who are grieving carry an elevated risk for depression, anxiety, and even suicidal ideation [2]. This risk becomes especially concerning when the loss is traumatic. Finding a provider who understands both the complexity of grief and the heightened impact of holidays and other significant dates is crucial.
Understanding Different Grieving Styles
Traditional grief counseling has limits for many people. Many providers focus primarily on talk therapy, offering a space for people to share feelings, process emotions, and verbalize their grief. This approach tends to work well for intuitive grievers, or those who experience grief primarily through emotion [3].
Instrumental grievers may seem “controlled” or “logical” in their grief, coping by organizing, problem-solving, or creating rituals and structures around their loss [3].
For instrumental grievers, talk therapy alone may fall short, leaving them without the tasks, rituals, or symbolic actions that best support their way of processing grief.
Rituals as Bridges and Containers for Grief
When talking isn’t enough, it becomes important to explore other ways to ease pain and cultivate peace. Creative, personalized rituals can offer people tools for accepting loss, managing strong emotions, and inviting meaning-making into the grief process in ways that support both instrumental and intuitive grieving styles [3].
"Rituals give grief a container, offering shape and structure, a beginning, a middle, and, perhaps most importantly, an end."
These rituals can be personal or communal, tied to organized religious practices or entirely self-determined. Their purpose is to give grievers a sense of control, helping them set boundaries with their grief while fostering the deep self-understanding that comes from facing profound loss [3].
Holding Grief with Compassion During the Holidays
This holiday season, remember that grief doesn’t follow a straight path, and it’s okay if it comes in waves. Some days may feel heavy, while others offer a sense of calm, and neither is “wrong.”
Whether or not you believe it’s possible to take time off from grief, you can create moments of pause and care through rituals that feel meaningful to you.
These might be small, private gestures or shared traditions that honor your loss while grounding you in the present. Lighting a candle, preparing a favorite meal, or writing a letter to someone you miss can all be ways of holding your grief with intention.
What rituals are helping you navigate this season? Take a moment to notice what practices bring you comfort, and consider permitting yourself to create new ones. Your grief is part of your story, and the ways you honor it can help carry you through the season with both honesty and hope.
References:
[1] Larsen, L. H., Hybholt, L., & O'Connor, M. (2025). Lived experience and the dual process model of coping with bereavement: A participatory research study. Death Studies, 49(6), 743–754.
[2] Daniel, T. (2023). Adding a new dimension to grief counseling: Creative personal ritual as a therapeutic tool for loss, trauma and transition. OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying, 87(2), 363–376. https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228211019209
[3] Pavlacic, J. M., Bottomley, J. S., Williams, J. L., & Rheingold, A. A. (2025). Quantifying suicide risk in bereaved individuals. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001870
[4] National Alliance on Mental Illness. (2023, November 20). Mental health and the holiday blues. https://www.nami.org/press-releases/mental-health-and-the-holiday-blues/
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