Disclaimer: This is not to make people feel guilty for enjoying their holidays. This is not to shame people or to "holier than thou", and say that we now must stop everything and think this. I just want to point out something that I'm struggling to understand in my own life. Something I need to make very clear and I feel like some readers might misinterpret this: what I type is my truth, mine and only mine. I get that it may apply to you and others, but just because it's my truth; it doesn't mean that it's the correct way. Or that because you do something differently I am now hating on you.

In the midst of everything that has happened this year (pandemic, protest, election), I feel like the holidays are different this year.

Growing up, my mom was a single mother and I never thought that what she provided for my brother and I wasn't enough—until I was in high school. Camilo and I only had one or two gifts from our mom and the rest was from other family members. It was just the three of us and I could feel my mom's sadness every holiday. I know she wished she could give us more, but she couldn't. It wasn't until Instagram showed me how much I was missing, that I knew our Christmas wasn't abundant.

Now that I'm older I just feel like I need to say this: Please, please, please, do not max out your credit cards just to buy presents. Do not feel pressured to prove to anyone that you have the most Christmas spirit. It's okay if December 25th is just another day, and it's okay if you aren't happy. It's okay if you've lost someone and you miss them and Christmas isn't the same without them.

The holidays can be so isolating. I can't even imagine not being Christian and seeing all this Christmas crap. Why do we say Merry Christmas? What if someone celebrates Kwanzaa, or any other practice or religion, like why is Christianity the holiday in the U.S.A where the whole country shuts down? Do other religions not deserve recognition? This is something that doesn't sit well with me, and I'm not quite how to help.

I've noticed how consumer driven our culture seems. I know I feel this pressure to gift the best gift, even when I don't have money; and this is the first year I didn't buy gifts on credit. I feel like there's this pressure to have the perfects gifts and the more things we have the happier we will be. We say things like, "it's the thought that counts", but then aren't happy when we only get a notecard or something that didn't cost much.

I also assumed that since we were in the midst of a pandemic, we would not be out shopping as much, and I was wrong. People were out and about and being too close and you could literally feel stress in the air when I walked into Macy's. My whole body just felt stressed. Seeing so many people and seeing how we felt the need to buy things. This is something that it's stressing me out, does anyone else feel like this?