They say that one of the biggest problems with social media is that it inspires you to compare your life to the glamorized version of your friends’ lives. Perhaps nothing brings that out more than the holiday season.

My Instagram and Facebook foods are overflowing with holiday posts. “Here’s my beautiful Christmas tree!” “Wow, what a huge pile of gifts!” “Look at this glamorous place I traveled to for the long weekend.”

Meanwhile, the Cactus household is at home in a messy apartment, force feeding a mixture of baby food and crushed pills to a very sick and uncooperative corgi.

This is not what I had planned for the holidays. I mean, we were planning to stay close to home, because aforementioned corgi has a chronic illness and needs TLC on the best days. But we foolishly assumed that she’d be eating under her own power and we’d all enjoy a quiet weekend of snuggling, drinking hot cocoa (for the humans) and watching Netflix, maybe with some brisk walks in the frosty air.

We knew we’d have to have a modest holiday, but we expected it to at least be pleasant.

It’s hard not to be bitter, as friends show off their glamorous holidays and I’m over here just hoping we all survive the weekend.

In situations like this, you have to scrounge up moments of happiness where you can. For us, that means we’re binge watching a lot of sitcoms, eating chocolate from our stockings, and making sure to get snuggles in with the healthy pets (the sick corgi is feeling anti-social).

Our original plan was that this year, our first together in WA, away from both of our families, would be a chance to create our own holiday traditions. Instead, this will be a year we can look back on, any time something goes wrong in a future holiday, and say “Well, it could be worse.”

I know we’re not alone in this. I have friends who are also nursing sick pets this weekend, or facing an impending job loss, or struggling to find any joy in the current state of the world. I suspect there’s a lot more going on that I don’t know about, because there’s this big pressure in our society to not ruin the holidays for others, to put on a happy face and pretend to be feeling that “Christmas Spirit.”

The truth is, misfortune doesn’t care what day of the year it is. Bad things happen every day of the year, and some of us get struck with tragedy on Christmas, or our birthday, or our wedding anniversary. There’s no sense of fairness to the universe (because if there was, corgis would never get sick, they’re too cute to ever be miserable).

I hope that whatever you’re experiencing this holiday weekend, you feel like you have love and support. I hope that you don’t feel pressured to put on a fake happy face if you’re not feeling it. And if you are having a lovely holiday, well, have a little extra fun for those of us who have been dealt a bad hand this year.

(Featured image is from the Garden Lovers Club article on Christmas Cactus. I felt like you all deserved something pretty to look at).