I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a sense of pressure to create a holiday season that’s more special than usual, because it’s been such a difficult year.

I’ve been racking my brain to come up with  ideas to make it fun and memorable, which have been met with varying degrees of (usually lackluster) enthusiasm: An online Christmas Caroling party… the crowd-sourced zoom reading of a holiday play or tale… a virtual holiday cocktail party…. Alas, after this many months, the addition of the word “online” or “virtual” makes the idea anything but special.

Maybe I need to come up with something more creative.  Or maybe I just need to accept that this year will be totally unlike any other year and I simply need to look for the points of light in the darkness.

No matter what holidays you celebrate, as you think back over the years, there’s hopefully a warm glow in the collective memory of them. But examine any one year, and you may encounter disappointments or the occasional, dark, challenging holiday season you choose to ignore. Unpleasantness isn’t what we typically hold in our minds. What colors most people’s memories is the gathering of family and friends over food and drink, the goodwill shared, the joys of the season.

We generally remember the points of light, in spite of — or because of — the darkness: the year our child’s face lit up when s/he opened that special present blots the fact that our spouse was downsized right before Christmas that year; the peace we felt seeing our entire family seated at the table together smooths over the argument that took place 20 minutes ago in the kitchen. The meal on the table helps us forget that it is a little more sparse, and was more difficult to provide this year than in the past.

To find encouragement for this holiday season, instead of believing we need to overwrite the entire year with holiday magic, we simply need to look for, and create, the small points of light. Somehow those points of light, like a single candle, can burn brighter because of the darkness surrounding it.  And like a candle, it’s also possible to spread that light to others.