I like to spend time alone. I think it’s a lot of fun. I tend to fixate on activities, which is vaguely anti-social considering the fact that most people like to do one thing for a while and then move on, so alone time allows me to give myself permission to do something for five plus hours at a time. I like that. Whether I am playing video games, writing, or watching Hulu, nobody can interrupt me when I am alone to tell me that I’m being weird. But being alone on the holidays extracts such concern from other people that it can make you self-conscious about enjoying yourself; some people, who hate being alone, will make you feel as though there is something diabolically wrong with you for not preparing a turkey this week, a turkey to share. It’s hard to differentiate between self-pity and socially-imposed pity on the holidays: are you really sad to be by yourself, or does it just seem sad?

I sometimes felt that it would be easier to forget about the New Year’s Eve I spent locked in my solitary bedroom in fifth grade. I don’t know what I thought other fifth-graders were up to in rural Connecticut that New Year’s Eve. I probably assumed they were at a party with Jonathan Taylor-Thomas, drinking two-liter after two-liter in someone’s mother’s kitchen until the sugar and caffeine prompted everybody to TP someone’s house. I have never TPed a house, but I did worry that evening that this crew of imaginary mischievous teens would TP mine, because everyone would know I was alone. I didn’t want to let New Year’s slide by unacknowledged, however, so I spent the early evening cutting printer paper into tiny pieces and placing each one carefully into a bucket. I poured myself a goblet of ginger ale and did my hair (in a hair net; I used to wear a hair net because I read a lot of uncool dated literature that confused me as to the fashion-forwardness of snoods), and sat in front of the television waiting for midnight. I said goodnight to my parents at 10:30 and accidentally woke them up an hour and a half later when I wished myself “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!” as I tossed homemade confetti all over my head. Some of it got in my ginger ale. At 12:02 I cried, an Irish Catholic wintry mix of self-pity and shame that my parents had opened the door to see me sitting in a pile of my own litter in a hair net. I think they said, “Aww.” Then they shut the door because I think I said, “Get out of here! Get out of here! Don’t look at me!”

The trouble with that New Year’s wasn’t the hair net or lame celebrating, but the fact that immediately following the moment the ball dropped in Times Square, I had to clean up all the confetti that I’d made and throw it away, which was nearly impossible because I had tossed the confetti with such a manic exuberance that it was everywhere: in my ginger ale, in my hair net, in my ears, and under the bed. When I got up to start gathering the bits, some of them flew under the door and into the hall. Some of them were stuck to the back of my capri leggings. I had never seen so much confetti: it was a sad testament to how much time I’d spent making it, for only myself to enjoy. When I took a bath at 1 AM, the confetti glued itself into a wet ball and stuck in the drain. It seemed important to remove all of the evidence of my pity party before the real start of the new year, so I wept and crawled around on the floor for a long time, obsessively hunting down paper shreds like some weird dowager described by Edgar Allen Poe. I would not have done this on any other Saturday evening. On any other Saturday evening I would have blithely played Mario Paint at a quiet volume, clicking away in a happy trance until dawn. But holidays are different than other days.

This will be my first solo Thanksgiving in a long time. I usually go back east to visit my parents, but I can’t this year, and my husband is with his family in DC. For the past six years, I’ve made turkeys and stuffing and mashed potatoes and pie; it seems sacrilegious not to, suspiciously un-American and depressing, like giving up. A person can worry that they’re being ungrateful — well, unthankful — by just sort of Mario-Painting their way from November 23 through the 25th. I was in Gelson’s yesterday and passed a frozen Turducken, and worried for a minute that I might have to get it. “You should buy that,” someone inside suggested, “so that you can eat it and know that it’s Thanksgiving.” But then I saw a vision in the chicken cutlets — the pink protein shapes doobly-doo’ed and melted into a picture of a tween spending hours snipping teeny weeny pieces of paper — and I thought that maybe eating a Turducken with a fork all alone was worse than just throwing some cranberries into a salad and being at peace. The worst holidays you experience will not necessarily be those you spend alone: spending holidays alone can be an almost religious experience, reducing the mulled cider down to a beautifully-distilled unfattening ether, the holiday spirit. What better way to feel thankful for what you have than to be without it, when on previous occasions you maybe groaned about having to make small talk with crazy uncles or eat Aunt Susie’s bitter brussels sprouts? How you handle yourself in these situations proves your mettle. It ain’t the confetti, brother, it’s the expression you wear when you throw it all over your hair net. If I could do it all over again, I’d do it like Mary Tyler Moore in the opening credits, throwing her hat into the sky, beaming. This Thursday, I will throw a pitcher of gravy onto my head at dusk, smiling, maybe laughing, maybe singing “FEEL THE RAIN ON YOUR SKIN.” My dog will be happy to erase any evidence of this. Maybe that’s the reason why I spent all that time, years ago, making confetti for New Year’s Eve: if you’re spending the holidays solo, at least make it so weird that it’s memorable. I’ve forgotten lots of New Years Eves, but have never been able to forget the one with the confetti. Bothering to throw yourself a party is not a guaranteed good time, but it’s a guaranteed some-kind-of time, and that’s really all the holidays are supposed to be. At some point, the Ghost of Thanksgivings Past will make you take inventory, and you want to make sure you have enough contrast in your vignettes, enough lessons underlined and italicized so you get a picture of who you really are, have been, and might become. Otherwise, you might wind up taking it all for granted.