Grief During the Holidays: 12 Ways to Find Grace When Someone You Love Is Missing

Reading time: about 9 minutes.

The lights go up across the street. A song you used to sing together drifts out of a store speaker. Someone asks what your plans are for the holidays, and your throat closes before you can answer.

This season is built around togetherness, which is exactly why an empty chair feels so loud.

If you’re wondering how to get through the holidays without them, or how anyone finds joy in a season that spotlights everything you’ve lost, you’re not alone. Every feeling you’re carrying belongs here.

Below you’ll find how grief tends to move through the first few holiday seasons, twelve gentle ways to care for yourself, plus a story about a bare Christmas tree that taught me how love outlasts absence.

Stay until the end for a simple ritual you can do with one ornament, one memory, and one person who’ll listen.

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What Do the First Three Holiday Seasons of Grief Feel Like?

Grief keeps its own calendar

During the holidays, grief rarely looks the same twice. It shifts from one year to the next, and knowing the terrain ahead can soften it.

What Are 12 Ways to Manage Grief During the Holidays?

Counting down to the one that keeps them close

Skim these. Keep the ones that land, then leave the rest for another year.

1. Acknowledge your vulnerability. Emotions run high this time of year. Give yourself permission to feel exactly as you do.
2. Expect your mood to swing. Laughing at breakfast, crying by lunch. Both are part of grieving, neither needs judging.
3. Let your social needs shift. Craving company one minute, solitude the next, is completely normal.
4. Accept changes in sleep or appetite. Routines drift when you’re grieving. Nourish yourself as best you can, minus the guilt.
5. Tell people what you need. Some will try to cheer you up, others will give you space. Say plainly which one helps: company, a listening ear, or time alone.
6. Let yourself cry. Tears are release, not weakness. Grieving is healing in motion.
7. Make room for complicated feelings. Sadness, anger, even resentment toward the person you lost can all show up. The American Psychological Association notes how varied grief reactions truly are.
8. Know you don’t have to participate. Declining invitations is allowed. The Washington Post explores choosing what’s best for your mental health during this season.
9. Move your body for your mind. Even a short walk releases tension that sitting still only stores.
10. Reach out when it gets heavy. Trusted friends, family, or a grief support group give your feelings somewhere to go.
11. Trust that relief comes with time. Grief doesn’t vanish overnight, though its sharpest edges do soften, slowly, then surely.
12. Create new traditions that honor them. Light a candle, share a story over dinner, cook their recipe. Weaving their memory into new rituals turns grief into remembrance, which is exactly why this one sits at number one.

Is It Okay to Skip the Holidays While Grieving?

Permission slip, signed and dated

Yes. You don’t owe anyone a brave face or a performance of festivity you don’t feel.

Sitting this one out can be an important way of honoring your grief rather than hiding from it.

If you stay home, give the day a little shape. Salt water helps, in every form: tears, sweat, a long salt bath. Each one settles the nervous system in a way that’s difficult to explain until you feel it.

Personally, I love the shock of jumping into the frigid Canadian ocean. I call it the full factory reset. A warm bath works too, with considerably less screaming.

Can Helping Others Heal Your Grief?

Service fills the space loss hollowed out

One of the most healing ways through grief is turning it into kindness.

Volunteer at a shelter, join a food drive, give an afternoon to a cause your loved one cared about.

Service creates connection from an unexpected direction. In giving, you begin to fill some of the space loss leaves behind, often while honoring the very person you’re missing.

Are Our Loved Ones Still With Us During the Holidays?

Unseen is not the same as gone

Even without their physical presence, it’s natural to feel your loved one close. Not being able to see or hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t here.

They live on in every story, every cherished memory, every comforting thought that surfaces unannounced. Their love reminds you to keep living fully, while cherishing the people still beside you.

Wondering whether they visit in dreams? Discover more here.

How Does Connection Carry Us Through Holiday Grief?

The story of a bare tree

As a hospice volunteer, I see firsthand how much we need each other. Everyone carries a private struggle this time of year, and every one of us benefits from someone simply staying present.

Here’s what that presence can do.

When I first met my husband, I knew his mother had passed before he told me. That Christmas, he insisted his dad put up lights and get a tree, knowing I’d be visiting. They hadn’t decorated since she died.

On Christmas Eve, the tree stood bare in the living room, a quiet symbol of their grief.

We pulled down the old boxes. I handed them ornaments one at a time, asking for the story behind each.

With every story, the room got lighter. Her loving spirit filled the space, as if she were laughing right beside us, reminiscing along.

It took someone outside the grief to call those stories out of storage, right alongside the ornaments.

When people say loved ones live on in memory, it’s really an invitation to feel their love again. Lean into those memories and let them warm you. As a psychic medium, I can tell you that warmth is exactly what connecting with them feels like. (Yes, really.)

A Simple Ritual: The Ornament Story

This is the practice I promised at the start. It’s built from that Christmas Eve, and it works whether you have a tree this year or not.

Stories have a way of bringing people back into the room. Let them.

This season, lean into the memories that comfort you. Take care of yourself, seek support when you need it, and let the people around you know they’re cherished. The holidays may look different now, though they can still hold meaning.

Next, I’m writing about the empty chair: whether to set a place for them at dinner, plus what tends to happen when you do. If you’ve been quietly wondering, that one’s for you.

Where Can I Read More About Grief?

If any of these speak to what you’re moving through, follow the one that pulls at you most:

• Christmas grief: Seven truths
• Nonlinear grief: Not linear
• Finding peace: After loss
• Loved ones: Reaching out
• Still feeling: Signs explained
• Their belongings: Not yet

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About the Author

Chris Bennett, known as The Tarot Medium, is internationally recognized as the best tarot reader in the world, trusted by clients across Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, plus South Africa. Known for accurate, honest readings free of fear or theatrics, his work spans evidential mediumship, intuitive tarot, psychic life path readings, plus grief support rooted in real psychological depth, always beside therapy, never in place of it. His online readings reach clients in Toronto, Calgary, Halifax, Winnipeg, Ottawa, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Denver, Nashville, Miami, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria, plus everywhere in between.