Every December, a version of the same column appears. The lonely at Christmas, the empty chair, the plea to check on your neighbour. The sentiment is decent. The problem is the furniture: the same images, the same pitying tone, the same implied reader who is cosy and safe and being invited to look kindly on somebody else. If you want to write about festive loneliness and have it land, you have to take that template apart first.
Question the season's default script
Christmas arrives with a ready-made picture: the crowded table, the matching pyjamas, the family walk, the film everyone agrees on. Loneliness then gets defined as the absence of that picture. It is worth saying plainly that the picture is an advertisement, not a memory.
Ask what your column treats as normal. A reader who works Christmas night on a ward, or who lives alone by choice, or who stopped speaking to a parent three years ago, will not see themselves in a piece built on the assumption that everybody else is surrounded. Freshness here is not decoration. It is accuracy.
Drop the pity register
Two habits make festive loneliness writing feel worn. The first is the second-person warning: you might be dreading the twenty-fifth. You do not know that. You know it is common, and common is not the same as your reader.
The second is the noun. "The lonely" turns people into a category to be discussed rather than heard. Nobody calls you "the tired". Prefer the adjective, or better still, prefer a person doing something specific: she eats her dinner at six because the light is better then.
Sensitivity is not softness. It means writing alongside rather than down.
Bin the stock images
These have all been sharp once. Now they arrive pre-felt, and the reader's flicker of recognition is for the writing, not the subject:
- The single mince pie on a plate.
- The television left on for company.
- The elderly neighbour with the cat.
- The untouched place setting.
- Carol singing as redemption arc.
- "Nobody should be alone at Christmas" — a line so broad it erases the people who would rather be.
Replace them with something small and observed. The group chat that goes quiet at half past three. The walk to the shop that takes forty minutes because the shop is the destination. The neighbour's dishwasher audible through the wall at midnight, and the odd comfort of it. One precise detail does more work than three paragraphs of atmosphere.
Let the ending stay unresolved
Column inches push towards a close: an invitation, a lesson, a warm final line about how a cup of tea and a proper chat can make all the difference. Sometimes a cup of tea is not the answer, and saying so is more honest than pretending otherwise.
Not every piece needs a fix. If you do offer something, keep it concrete and cheap: being the person who texts on Boxing Day as well as the twenty-fifth, remembering anniversaries, asking twice because the first answer was fine. Be wary of duty framing. "Reach out to someone lonely this Christmas" turns the reader into a task and the lonely person into a project.
Separate loneliness from being alone
These are different words and they deserve different columns. Someone can spend the twenty-fifth alone and be perfectly content: a book, a bath, no small talk. Someone else can be surrounded by relatives and counting the hours until they can leave. Someone may be estranged, and the estrangement may be the healthiest decision they have made all year.
If you write about being alone, be specific about who you mean. That list is longer and more varied than most festive columns allow:
- People on shift — care workers, drivers, chefs, vets, cleaners, pharmacists.
- People for whom the day is a budgeting problem rather than a mood.
- People in the first Christmas after a death, a separation or a diagnosis.
- People whose faith, culture or family does not mark the day at all.
- People who are alone because they chose it, and would like to stay that way.
Naming these readers changes the temperature of a piece. It stops being a broadcast about sadness and becomes a conversation with several actual lives.
Test the draft before you file
Most weak festive columns are not badly intentioned. They are under-edited. Run these checks and you will catch the lazy moves early:
- Read it aloud. Strike any sentence that sounds like a Christmas advert voiceover.
- Check who is speaking. Is the person you are writing about a subject with a life, or an object of your concern?
- Count the feeling adjectives — heartbreaking, devastating, magical. One may be one too many.
- Ask whether someone in that situation would recognise themselves or wince.
- Cut every "should", including the buried ones.
- Show it to someone whose Christmas looks nothing like yours.
Before you publish
Write the piece you would want to read on the day itself, at four in the afternoon, with the light going. That means no tidy moral, no borrowed statistics to make the point land harder, and no tidy claim about how people feel.
If your column touches on grief, depression or self-harm, stay in your lane. Do not diagnose, do not offer clinical reassurance, and do not present a helpline as a solution to a housing or money problem. Point readers towards their GP or a reputable support service, and keep the advice general enough to be true. Where a topic sits close to health, money or the law, say plainly that professional advice is the sensible next step.
Then read your last paragraph again. If it resolves something that does not resolve in real life, cut it and end on the detail instead. A column about loneliness does not have to be lonely reading — but it should leave the reader with a truer picture of December than the one on the television.
Photo: oh0725 / Pixabay
