People Who Dread Christmas

and Hamnet (2025)

When Being Celebrated Doesn’t Hit Home

Oh, I cried throughout the whole Hamnet movie, right from the beginning – the beautiful beginning of love. That rare love from the first sight when your souls choose each other. The ringing in your ears… when there is no place for rational analysis and you choose “to be” despite the odds. The tragedy begins when your being is first conditioned by society’s rules and natural consequences. 

In our childhood Christmas, our growth and performance were orchestrated by people who surrounded us. Yeah, those stressed adults who were supposed to model being and survival for us. As children, we could feel this celebration was somewhat important: there was a tension of expectations but the focus was around performance and gifts. And we had to navigate how to show up while our routine was interrupted and all of a sudden we were somewhere new or people we rarely saw came to our home. And it all seemed like we were being tested: mum’s cooking, dad’s stories, our intellectual progress. In my culture we had to “earn our gift” by singing or reading poems publicly. We were also dressed as animals, but that’s for another analysis. These are vivid memories about our performance, on which the whole family's “happiness” depended. And if the performance didn’t land well, or the adults were already too relaxed after a few drinks – the shame of not being good enough, and no pre-modelled way to fix it, became that wiring with the fear of pain in the circuit. 

And then we grow up, but still can’t fully decide how this season is going to be spent: we owe some sort of performance to the extended family and society in general. My friend calls me and asks where she can get a lot of silk paper cheaper… I know she has no money for the Christmas gifts as we decided not to give any gifts to each other this year. Nevertheless, she stretches out for her new colleagues in the office. Ah, the sign of self-neglect for the sake of being connected to your tribe… We feel like we owe a lot more than just considering gifts; we owe our presence and performing happiness at the same time. Our being is conditioned this whole season.

Only the fact that your vulnerability was conditioned is a good enough reason to grieve. 

I worked in the Christmas industry for many years. Hundreds of visitors and participants in my Christmas events that resembled spaces where intimacy was not for entertainment. People walked in, engaged and mainly tried to integrate their pain. These spaces did not make them have to perform, so the tension dropped fast. The settings accepted their truth and sadness during the time of celebrations. Their opinions only sounded as though they refuse to participate in collective dissociation, but underneath there was their original pain. 

Christmas became an engineered reality of consumerist culture, where these old wires are pulled, leaving no option to escape. Especially now with symbols of Christmas being on display as early as October. You can choose from the varieties of avoidance, but the art of exit does not exist. Pressure builds and adults get drunk and unconscious, emotions bubble and people flounce, some commit suicide (as my therapist calls it “a radical expression of own will”). Children see that mess and make up their own mind about Christmas (usually just echo chambers) but none receive a healthy model of individual agency. All just the avoidance followed by more pain, the worst pain – pain of shame.

We don’t know for sure whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet after losing his son. The movie Hamnet proposes that he wrote to process the great sorrow of loss and shame. But art is also conditioned. The timeframes, marketing and money enter the loop of tragedy-pain-shame-loneliness. But wait, grief cannot be conditioned! Grief is barely even defined! Nobody can tell you how long you can grieve for. Nobody can tell you what to grieve and how. It is yours and yours alone, so personal and so valid. And too strong to be conditioned, really. Just like real love. Wait… Grief IS Love that has nowhere to go.

I have always said that art nowadays is not about creating objects but about creating spaces. Throughout many years of working with adults and children during this season, I created and provided spaces where my clients and students could just be. But we were still conditioned by the theme, skills and our wiring. I have witnessed all sorts of behaviours related to trauma release or avoidance. One of the harshest behaviours to witness is self-minimising. It starts as self-doubt, then public self-devaluation once their mind reaches that pain knot. I tried to be there to catch and hold their pain because I knew from neuroscience - emotions are processed within 90 seconds. I only had to catch and hold them for 90 seconds. But there was more pain, not from the trigger, but from the story behind it. The story that our mind tells us carries more pain than any past event. When we act from that pain, it becomes our identity we end up hating. 

The conditioning of Christmas is, basically, control. Control is a term related to territory, more abstract than geographical in our context. Because nobody can possibly control your grief, you feel both lonely and disoriented. And this is where the tired mind can become your enemy: if there is no symbol to attack, or if there is no permission for it, the brain has the horrid function of “displacement”. I witness self-attacks as a defence mechanism all the time; for example, a child destroying their own work. Because a classroom setting is conditional visibility, there’s very little control over “being protected when seen”. Tearing one's own work is an act of self-protection when an individual is “exposed”, whether by the presence of others or voices of shame in their head. It is “let me reject me first, so that no one else can hurt me”. Does your rejection make Christmas disappear? Does it make your grief disappear? This is where the helplessness hits.

In Hamnet, the tragic circumstances created a vulnerable space where the sudden loss and grieving were witnessed, and at the same time shared and mirrored. And having no rules for grief, it was too big in the moment. It took time to process and to create that integration. Therefore, “to be or not to be” is not necessarily about suicide. It is the question who decides whether you, with your personal pain, live authentically or exist in a conditioned form.

No secret that my art includes my grief; and in the teaching settings I create space that can hold the grief of others. The integration of grief into your life is the integration of love that could not exist at some point. Whether it becomes an art object, a book, a personal philosophy or a whole religion – it is all grief that cannot be conditioned so the mind creates symbols. Instead of attacking these symbols in a form of avoidance, they can be integrated through art. For many people, Christmas or birthdays are symbols that represent their individual grief, and making art of it is not just processing pain but owning it. You own your loss instead of disappearing in it.

I now work with sensitive nervous systems in controlled environments. Nervous systems that feel violence in what others call “success” or “entertainment”. Individuals whose innocence was attacked. People who have never experienced safe relationships but moved from one unsafe humiliationship to another. Their presence has never been mirrored, only their performance. Moreover, they were never celebrated for just being. Their body feels that they literally disappear in these celebrations. That is why I work during holidays. I learned early in life how dangerous holidays and celebrations can be, because we are all human and vulnerable to defeat.

Hamnet is a deep movie showing fear of the unknown accompanying our personal happiness: the attempts to predict, protect and save. Shakespeare fought against the acts of conditioning unconditional love. He showed how parental love was conditional and conditioned. He showed how unconditional romantic love meets society conditions. And he showed people acting from their shame because their distress is seen as lack of love. This is the “not to be” – living in a false self, shaped by internalised authority and external scripts. Hamlet’s paralysis is not about death. The tragedy is in the conditioning, not death. 

Failing at my mission is also integrated. I know that deconditioning patterns is a process we don’t have enough time for as professionals or caregivers. It took me years to realise that my limits don’t say anything about my worth. Falling is natural. It is a matter of luck where you fall. A lot of people fall into darkness, loneliness, shame. Not many can fall into the softness of love. Real love is living with pain, and appreciating the rare moments when someone can hold it with you.

The names Hamlet and Hamnet come from the same root. In Middle English, suffixes -et and -let were diminutives meaning “little” (pig - piglet). The Old Germanic root of the name is Hamo/Haimo/Hamon/Hamun which is related to “home”. Hence, Hamnet and Hamlet are “little Hamo” = “little home”. 

“To be or not to be” is whether to be that little home for your vulnerable self and those you love, or to submit to despair of conditioning. The choice of “not to be” is as old as the nervous system survival mechanism, a poor coping tool we feel ashamed of, because retreat is seen as weakness. Sometimes retreat is the only way to survive. Art can metabolise even that. It gives the opportunity to build a new home where you matter.

To be is not to close your heart.