A rough essay I've pitched on only children and Christmas

My only adult Christmas

It's during the holidays that only children realize all children with siblings envy them. Being told we are "spoiled" becomes part of Christmas thereafter.

Growing up, I imagined people with siblings believed my parents hired a dump truck to deliver my presents. This myth of spoiling is highly inaccurate (the truck is, at most, a compact pickup) and leads to a grudge that remains between onlies and siblingtons, one that somehow locks only children into childhood. And yet we surely age. I'm a 34-year-old only adult. I have thinning hair, a mortgage, but don't have a wife or children. I still go home for Christmas. And while you may have envied my childhood Christmas, I'm quite certain the adult experience isn't something you want.

But let's examine that grudge. Even the person behind Christmas itself, Jesus, is caught in it. Debate rages in Christian Internet chat rooms whether the man was an only child or not, the implication being, clearly, that even Jesus can't be so great with that hanging over him. Here's a secret: Elvis, Frank Sinatra and Isaac Newton were all only children, as is Condoleezza Rice, Lance Armstrong and Robert De Niro. You don't hear them bragging though—they all fear the grudge.   

Christmas as an adult, of course, is different than as a child. On paper an only adult Christmas looks promising. Holiday mirth without brothers and sisters and the countless others they spawn, or marry, or yell at, sounds manageable. I must admit after talking to frustrated friends, post-Christmas, I've sometimes felt lucky.

True, only children don't have to deal with drama that siblings bring to households. It's also true that most of the sibling-related holiday drama I've experienced has been as a guest in other people's homes. I go to these homes often at Christmas. Though most believe we're spoiled as kids, only adults are correspondingly pitied as under-familied, and thus invited into friends' homes where we're given gifts (luckily we have that truck) and treated as distant sons or daughters.

But away from these warming cameos in other families, my Christmas as an only adult is hard to share. Few understand it so I don't talk about it often. For one, it's tough on the ego. Few adults must downgrade themselves when informing people of Christmas plans with family like I have to. Unless you know me, your second question about Christmas is always, "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" My disappointing answer: "No, I'm an only child." Perhaps that's why some adult only children have taken to calling themselves "singletons."

For two, while there is a tome of academic research on children without siblings, which has mostly deduced that only children are normal, an optimistic search will find about five pages on only children when they become adults. So few people think about only children as adults that I just go with the flow and say nothing as well. At no time of the year is this more apparent than at Christmas.

Take this year, for example: My Christmas was spent over three days at the modest country home just outside of Guelph of my two late 60-something parents. I brought no one with me; no one came by to visit; there were no children, which I'm realizing, is critical for Christmas. And I haven't explained the experience to anyone.

Without a brother or sister, I'm the only guest who ever sleeps at my parents' place. It is thus known at all times where I am (my old bedroom) and what I'm doing (sitting in it). This lack of autonomy and boundaries sees me revert to my adolescent only-child strategy—bunkering in said room and reading for countless hours on end. Not exactly Christmassy behaviour.

Because I don't have a brother who had kids early on, or a sister who's a bigger screw-up in her career, or some variation therein, I have a lot of pressure. My parents, thankfully, don't push family or career expectations on me, but the lack of siblings to gauge my life-progress sees me do it to myself, by comparing myself to absolutely everyone. Christmas only amplifies this feeling that I don't have what I should. The quiet house thus feels like my fault (no wife or kids). Not exactly a happy Christmas sentiment.

But most of all, Christmas is a reminder for the only adult like me of what's around the corner. More than 44 per cent of Canadian children born today will grow up without siblings, a trend toward only children that is increasingly echoed in the U.S., Asia and Western Europe. Few talk of what happens when these kids hit their 40s or 50s, as I soon will, and have to care for their elderly parents—and have no siblings to share the load with.

Coming home at Christmas, then, I can't help but notice my parents aging, their mobility dropping, and realize the clock is ticking on my freedom. Both my parents now have replacement titanium joints, arthritis, and CPAP-machines to treat apnea. Both tire quickly. Both struggle up stairs with grunts and groans. And that isn't going to change.

I once thought the perfect Christmas was having the perfect family, as in a family with siblings, money, happiness. But then I experienced Christmas from the other side—the nuclear family in full, Three Mile Island glow: Blond children with upper-middle class parents singing carols around the family piano, laughing-all-the-way, ha-ha-ha! If I were Norman Rockwell I'm sure I'd quietly have Christmagasmed in the corner, but I found the experience strangely terrifying.

What I've realized I love about families at Christmas is the acceptance of things not so perfect, of finding happiness in spite of life's challenges. My only adult Christmas is the same, even though it's something I struggle to share. Don't envy it. But then don't pity it, either.