Grief at Christmas: coping with the empty chair

The supermarket is playing Christmas songs, and someone in the family group chat asks who's hosting Christmas dinner this year. Your stomach tightens. When you set the table, there'll be one plate fewer. Maybe it's your first Christmas without your mum, your brother or your partner, and you're not sure you want to celebrate anything. Or maybe the loss was years ago and, even so, every December stirs it all up again.

Grief at Christmas has a simple explanation. A season built around being together makes the person who's missing more visible. In this article I explain why it weighs so much, what you can do with the empty chair, how to support children and when it's worth asking for help.

Why grief at Christmas feels heavier

Christmas is made of rituals that repeat every year. Who cooks what, who sits where, who makes the toast, who always turns up late. When someone is missing, you notice the absence in every one of those small things. For the rest of the year, routine helps you keep going, whereas over the festive season almost everything invites you to remember. That's why grief at Christmas can feel so present.

There's a name for this. They're called anniversary reactions, and they appear around the date of the death, the person's birthday and other significant occasions. A systematic review of 58 papers concludes that they're real and can be both psychological and physical (Leaune, Lau-Taï and Pitman, 2026). If you have no energy these days, or your body is feeling it too, you're not imagining it.

There's another factor, which is the pressure to be happy. Adverts, lights and 'merry Christmas' messages assume everyone is cheerful, and when you aren't, you can feel out of place. Pretending you're fine so as not to spoil things for everyone else is exhausting. I go into this in more depth in the article on toxic positivity.

The first Christmas without them

For many people, the first Christmas after a death is the hardest, especially if the loss is recent. Everything is 'the first time without'. The first Christmas Eve dinner, the first New Year's Eve, the first year they don't ring to wish you a merry Christmas. You may find the weeks before frighten you more than the day itself, because waiting makes the dread grow.

It isn't always like that, though. Some people spend the first year in a kind of fog, still in shock, and feel the blow at the second Christmas, when the rest of the family has gone back to normal. Grief doesn't follow a calendar, and there's no date after which it has to hurt less.

What 'empty chair syndrome' means

In the Spanish and Catalan press, the sadness caused by a loved one's absence at Christmas celebrations is often called empty chair syndrome. It isn't a diagnosis, and you won't find it in psychiatric manuals. It describes a normal reaction to loss, on days that are especially full of memories.

The empty chair isn't always left by a death, either. The NHS points out that grief can also follow the end of a relationship, losing a job or a home, or someone close becoming seriously ill. At Christmas, that includes the first year after a separation, with the children split between two homes. It also includes a relative in hospital or changed by illness, which sometimes brings anticipatory grief, or living far away and spending the festive season without your people, which is part of migratory grief. When those around you don't recognise a loss as a reason to grieve, the researcher Kenneth Doka calls it disenfranchised grief, and it weighs twice as much because it feels as if you have no right to be sad.

What to do with the empty chair

There's no right answer, and each family finds its own. These are some options that help:

• Leave the chair where it was, with a candle or a photo, as a way of saying they're part of the evening too.
• Change the seating plan, or even whose house you have dinner at, so the gap isn't so obvious.
• Cook the dish they loved, or the one they used to make, and say so out loud.
• Raise a short toast in their memory at the start of the meal, and then let the conversation go wherever it goes.

Talking about it beforehand saves a lot of upset. If one sibling wants the photo on the table and another can't bear it, it's better to know in mid-December than to find out over dessert. If you can't agree, look for a middle ground, such as putting the photo on the sideboard instead.

How to prepare for grief at Christmas

The festive season brings lots of small decisions. Where to have dinner, who's coming, whether to do Secret Santa, whether to put up the tree. When you're living through grief at Christmas, each one costs twice as much, and preparing ahead takes some of the weight off.

Decide early and have a plan B

Think about which gatherings you feel up to and which you don't. Maybe this year you can manage Christmas lunch but not New Year's Eve, or the other way round. You can go for a while, arrive for dessert or leave early, and agree a signal with someone you trust so you can step outside for some air if it gets too much. Sometimes just knowing there's a way out gives you the strength to stay.

You can also change your traditions. Some families eat out that year, go away or have a smaller dinner. Changing them doesn't mean forgetting the person who died. This year you need something different, and next year you may go back to the usual.

Small Christmas rituals to remember them

For decades, people thought grieving meant 'letting go' of the person. In 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman proposed another view, the idea of continuing bonds. Keeping a relationship with someone who has died, talking about them and remembering them can be part of healthy grief. Christmas is a good time to do this with small gestures:

• Hang a bauble with their name, or something of theirs, on the tree.
• Write them a letter and read it aloud or keep it.
• Light a candle on Christmas Eve.
• Make a donation to a cause they cared about.
• Tell one of their stories at the table, the kind that used to make everyone laugh.

When everyone at home grieves differently

In the same family, some people want the usual Christmas 'because he would have wanted it', while others can't stand the sight of fairy lights. Maybe mum needs to talk about dad all the time and the eldest son can't. None of these reactions is better than the other. As the NHS puts it, there's no right or wrong way to feel.

The researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described grief as a back-and-forth between two poles (Stroebe and Schut, 1999). One pole is the loss itself: crying, looking at photos, missing them. The other is life carrying on: paperwork, looking after the children or switching off for a while. Moving between the two is part of the process. That's why you can laugh at a story over dinner and, ten minutes later, need to go to the bathroom to cry. Both can happen on the same night.

If you'd like to understand better how it unfolds, there's a guide to the grief process and its stages.

Children and grief at Christmas

For children, Christmas means excitement. Father Christmas, the Three Kings, the holidays. When someone in the family has died, many parents wonder whether to keep everything the same or whether that would be disrespectful. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends anticipating the moments that can reawaken children's grief, such as anniversaries, and helping them understand what has happened (Schonfeld and colleagues, 2024). Grief at Christmas is one of those moments.

Use clear words such as 'died', and avoid euphemisms like 'we lost him' or 'she went to sleep', which confuse younger children. Children understand more than it seems, and they often hide what they feel to protect their parents.

Excitement and sadness can coexist

A child can cry in the morning and play as if nothing had happened in the afternoon. It doesn't mean they don't care, because children's grief comes and goes. Keeping Father Christmas or the Three Kings, even in a simpler way, gives them security. At the same time, it helps to make room for the person who is missing and to invite them to take part without forcing them:

• Draw a picture or write a letter to the person and hang it on the tree.
• Choose a decoration together that reminds you of them.
• Explain that it's possible to feel happy and sad at the same time, and that it happens to grown-ups too.

If you cry in front of them, that's all right. Seeing that adults can be sad and still look after them teaches children that sadness can be held. You'll find more ideas for each age in the article on childhood grief.

Looking after yourself over the festive season

Grief is tiring, and so is Christmas. Together they can leave you running on empty. These tips, many of them from the NHS, can help you get through it:

• Talk about how you feel with someone you trust or with a professional.
• Eat at regular times and move every day, even if it's just a short walk. Exercise can lift your mood and may help you sleep better.
• Set yourself small goals. You don't have to go to every meal or buy every present.
• Go easy on the alcohol. There's a lot of it around at Christmas, and the NHS advises against using it to relieve grief because it can contribute to poor mental health.
• Keep some quiet time for yourself, without having to explain why.

If you live alone, think ahead about the emptiest days, like Christmas afternoon or New Year's Day, and plan something, however small. A phone call, a walk with someone, a few hours of volunteering. Unwanted loneliness can weigh more at this time of year.

How to support someone through grief at Christmas

If someone close to you is facing their first Christmas after a death, you don't need the perfect words. Being there helps more than getting the sentence right.

• Say the name of the person who died. Many people worry that talking about them will hurt, but it often hurts more when everyone acts as if they never existed.
• Invite them without pressure, for example with 'we'd love you to come, and if you don't feel like it in the end, we'll understand'.
• Offer specific help, like bringing dinner round, going with them to the cemetery or looking after the children for an afternoon.
• Avoid phrases like 'you should be feeling better by now', 'at least they had a long life' or 'you have to be strong for the kids'.
• Remember them after the holidays too. When the festive season ends, the phone calls can easily end with it.

Normal grief or prolonged grief

If grief at Christmas hurts, it doesn't mean your grief is going wrong. The American Psychiatric Association explains that grief symptoms can rise again at particular times and that, in general, this doesn't call for treatment.

In some cases, though, the pain doesn't ease. In 2022, the DSM-5-TR, the association's diagnostic manual, added prolonged grief disorder. For an adult to be diagnosed, at least a year must have passed since the death (six months for children and adolescents). The person feels an intense longing for the one who died, or can't stop thinking about them, and during the last month has had at least three of these symptoms nearly every day:

• Feeling that part of themselves has died.
• Finding it very hard to believe the death has happened.
• Avoiding reminders that the person is dead.
• Intense emotional pain, such as anger, bitterness or sorrow.
• Difficulty getting back to life, seeing friends or making plans.
• Feeling emotionally numb.
• Feeling that life is meaningless without that person.
• Intense loneliness.

The grief must also last longer than would be expected in their culture and get in the way of daily life. A meta-analysis of 14 studies estimated that 9.8% of adults bereaved by a non-violent death develop prolonged grief (Lundorff and colleagues, 2017). According to the NHS, the risk is higher when the death was traumatic or sudden and unexpected.

Signs that grief at Christmas needs help

You don't have to wait a year or have a diagnosis to ask for help. It's worth seeing someone if:

• The pain hasn't eased at all over the months.
• You feel more and more sad or anxious, rather than less.
• You've stopped doing almost everything you used to do.
• You're drinking more to cope.
• The death was traumatic and the images keep coming back.

And if at any point you think about ending your life or hurting yourself, call 024 (Spain's suicide helpline), which is free and open 24 hours a day, or 112 in an emergency.

Support for grief at Christmas in Igualada and online

At my practice in Igualada and online, I support people going through grief at Christmas or any other loss, whether it's recent or they've been living with it for years. We work on the story of what happened, the meaning of the loss and your relationship with the person who died, and when the death was traumatic we use EMDR. If you're dreading the festive season ahead, we can also have one-off sessions to prepare for it. You'll find more about how I work on the page about online grief therapy. I work in Spanish and Catalan, as a health psychologist.

You don't need to reach Christmas with everything sorted. Get in touch and, in a first conversation with no commitment, we'll see how I can help.