Christmas hurts. I do not accuse Christmas of being a deliberately unsympathetic or sadistic holiday. Quite the contrary. Christmas is an ideal – both a promise of peace, love and togetherness, and a hope that those qualities can be found, at least breifly, in all people. For some people the season brings a forboding reality that is quite divergent from that ideal. For those who have never experienced the isolation and disappointment of Christmas, I only wish to explain that Christmas hurts. More specifically, it hurts me.

My name is David Branch.* I am writing this with the hopes that chronicling my past Christmas experiences will help my family understand what the holidays mean to me and help me better understand what happened to me to make be despise the season so much.

*The accounts, while autobiographical, are written with fictional names.