The much overused word liminal describes a doorway experience of existing or crossing between one moment or space and another. Adding to the proliferation of the term, I want to use it in this piece to describe a different way of approaching the Christian festival that marks the end of the Western calendar year. It is widely known as Christmas and it is more or less mandatory to celebrate it, or at least to observe it, with big chain stores requiring all their staff to wish customers a ‘happy Christmas’ regardless of the employee’s own religious beliefs and without considering whether the customer is happy to be interpellated as a Christian believer.
I can hear certain readers objecting already ‘but it has become a secular festival!!!’ and indeed, for the majority of Australian society who no longer espouse Christian faith, the occasion has become a festival of eating and drinking (which I love!) along with (re-)connection with family (profound ambivalence!) and rampant consumerism (totally hate!). It is all soaked in a sticky-sweet mandatory sentimentality encapsulated in vintage carols broadcast in every store: from the dirge-y (‘come, they told me, pa-ra-pa-pum-pum’) to the sickening (‘holly, jolly Christmas’).
As a person with ADHD I think a lot about attention and cognition. I have a high need for variety in life, manifested in an intense discomfort with repetition, and Christmas is all about tradition, i.e. the maintenance and repetition of specific rituals over and over through time. Even new observances quickly calcify. Time to defrost Mariah, everybody! Make your Christmas playlist and let’s all play Whamageddon!
This post is about getting unstuck.
My call to action on xmas
Let’s make it properly secular and take the Christ (and the consumerism) out of the festival occasion.
For a long time I’ve used the word xmas instead of Christmas to note my conscientious objection to the compulsory Christianity that pervades Western society at this time of year.
I only make an exception for my stepmother Helen who, I sense, abominates the abbreviation.
I even get mad with the predictive text on my phone which insists, insists on capitalising two words, no matter how often I remove them from my dictionary — God and Xmas.
But I’ve come to feel that xmasing the name doesn’t go far enough, and I’ve started calling this time of year ‘XNY’ — recognising the liminal period between xmas and New Year.
XNY is a gloss on LNY or CNY which denote Lunar New Year and Chinese New Year.
(Infodumping time: LNY and CNY are not the same festival! China follows a lunisolar calendar that incorporates the movements of the sun and moon, whereas LNY is celebrated in countries like Viet Nam that follow a strictly lunar calendar.)
Calling it XNY calls attention to the week between the X and the NY. This is my favourite time of year. It isn’t always happy — my family history all but guarantees a certain degree of sadness — but it is always meaningful — I often spend this time on writing projects, often about that fucked-up family history, that can be rewarding and therapeutic.
In this post I suggest that meaning is what happens when you’re paying attention, but we attend to different things in different ways, and XNY is an opportunity to strengthen some attentional practices that nourish you.
I acknowledge XNY is not such a wonderful time if you’re working all the way through it in the retail, medical, customer service and human services industries. I’m lucky to work in a job where the whole office (indeed the entire sector) shuts down over XNY so there’s no point working. But there’s nothing that says you have to do these things during XNY — treat this post as a menu you can choose from whenever you get a moment for rest.
What’s special about XNY
For me and other lucky buggers who get time off, XNY involves a period of enforced rest. I can let my body clock drift to my natural midnight to 10AM sleep cycle, I can eat when and if I feel like it, I can do some cleaning and tidying and household and bodily maintenance, I can enjoy the mid-morning sunlight whenever the Sydney humidity lets up enough for walking…
But I mentioned above that I see XNY as a meaningful time. Rather than letting Christianity force you to observe the true meaning of xmas, I recommend actively seeking meaning for yourself using a diverse mix of ‘practices of attention.’
Engaging diverse practices of attention
XNY is the ideal time for a form of ‘generative rest.’ I understand the tempation to activate goblin mode, live on left-over xmas ham and rot for the entire week leading up to New Year. But the attention practices I describe below can be understood as forms of active rest. They give your brain a break from the day-to-day linear, focused mode of cognition you rely on — and perhaps get stuck in.
Reading
This year I’m re-reading Ursula K Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. I read it in my teens and found it enjoyable but not life-changing; re-reading it is like being smacked in the gob with a pithy and poetic summary of lessons I had to learn the hard way. In particular, I am struck by the notion of doing by not-doing. Just being in the world in a way that invites other people to act in their freedom, their creativity and their agency, which allows good things to happen. Reading is the ultimate doing by not-doing.
Writing
I don’t journal much these days but it’s a huge pleasure having time to write a blog post, or a long e-mail to a friend, without feeling like I’m stealing time from the necessities of daily life.
Listening
I’m not a podcast person but there’s enormous pleasure to be found in exploring the music discovery options available on Youtube or your streaming platform of choice and making a playlist that captures your mood or feelings in a particular moment. Here is my current favourite — dreamy slow disco-pop from Jungle titled Back on 74. Which leads me to…
Watching
There’s something about modern dance that has the ability to shift my current mode of perception and cognition in a way I find profoundly nourishing and beneficial. I think it’s a switch from linear, focused thought into a more lateral mode of wholistic perception — watching the performance and seeing and feeling all the movements simultaneously. I spend so much time and energy trying to coerce my brain into focusing on a particular task that it feels liberating to let my attention wander and coalesce as freely as it desires.
Some kinds of dance do the trick and others do not. In some performances there’s an invisible baton passed from one dancer to the next to decide who gets to make the next big showy movement and these cause my attention to skip around in a way I find tiring; if your mind wanders and you miss a significant moment, you may lose the narrative thread altogether.
Other choreographers invite the audience to sit back and let the performance unfold before them as a complex wholistic experience in which movement is both multiple and synchronous, diverse and yet coherent, progressive but non-linear.
The music video for Back on 74 combines synchronous pieces with slow baton passing that works for my brain just fine —
If the video above is a chamber quartet, the next one is the dance equivalent of orchestra. It is mind-bogglingly fluid and expressive, confident and exuberant despite the melancholy music.
Gifting
In my call to action I said let’s take the consumerism out of XNY. I’m not saying we abandon giving our loved ones gifts, though. I’m proposing we give people new year’s gifts instead, and focus on giving meaningful rather than lavish presents.
I can hear you groan, ‘it’s so hard to buy someone a meaningful present.’ It really is, but a lot of the difficulty comes from shopping in the lead-up to xmas when we are running on empty. The ideal time for gift decisions is after the big festival, once we have time to rest and to think.
My favourite gift this year is a book I’m giving friends for their four-year old: the complete works of Frog and Toad by Arnold Siebel, who came out later in life as a gay man, and whose gorgeous illustrated work introduces children to the uncontroversial idea that men can love each other.
When homophobes demand to know ‘how do I tell my children about this filth,’ this — this is how you do it. There’s no need to talk about the butt sex. Start with the possibility of love and the everyday practice of compassionate intimacy. Choose an age-appropriate book and let your kid lead the conversation with their curiosity, setting appropriate boundaries (‘we can talk about that when you’re older’).
Above: my favourite t-shirt. (I lent mine to a cutie I was dating and the little fucker kept it.)
Cooking and eating
I’ve just noted that I find pre-xmas gift shopping exhausting because I’m not in the right headspace right after I’ve finished a long year at work. Shopping involves juggling multiple goals and going into deep comparative analysis on gift after gift for person after person. In my view the pre-xmas rush is the worst time for this kind of thinking.
Instead, it may be more nourishing at this time of year to focus on cooking — an act which, just as much as giving, signals your commitment to the people you care about, but encourages you to set aside the skipping, comparative mode of cognition and invest in moments of deep mindful attention that push the crowd of jostling thoughts right out of your mind.
Neurodivergent people call this hyperfocus. The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi called it flow — a moment of peak experience in which psychological arousal (attention and motivation) and control (practical skills) are perfectly optimised. It can be intensely rewarding and beneficial when you focus it skilfully (avoiding rumination, which is a deeply painful melancholic flow state).
Of course, you are tired and may not have the energy for cooking something complicated. My happy medium is moderately involved salads, especially if they involve roasting your damn vegies. You can prepare the ingredients in bursts — roast the pumpkins, take a nap, toast the walnuts, go for a walk — and bring it all together just before you serve.
Here are three roast salad dishes I have made this XNY for my chosen family. The second two encourage a ‘scoop-y’ style of eating, using your hands and fresh bread (I like soft pita) and potentially making a bit of a mess — which in my experience that makes everything taste better. (Always order burgers with extra sauce, and bring wet wipes for the cleanup.)
Roast pumpkin salad with radicchio, honey-toasted walnuts and gorgonzola
Baked brie with garlic butter mushrooms (photo by Deb Perel, Smitten Kitchen)
Ottolenghi’s roasted tomatoes with cold yoghurt (photo by Ottolenghi blog)
Re-connecting with chosen family
I’m proposing XNY as a time for generative rest so I don’t want to promote an obligation to catch up with people — your social battery may be pretty depleted by end of year exhaustion and the aftermath of a big xmas festival.
But XNY is an excellent time to reach out to the people you count in your chosen family and let them know you treasure the relationship, whatever form and frequency it may take.
Over the past few years I’ve done ‘orphans’ xmas’ lunches, either solo or cohosting with my treasured friend Liz. The orphans part has been a bit hit and miss; one year I had a garrulous guest and the next year we had a taciturn chap who ate and left. But the time I spent organising the occasion with Liz was delightful — we are both intensely hospitable people with a passion for interesting food, of course, but we also take friendship seriously as a life sustaining force.
Reflecting on loss
Just before xmas this year we had the Bondi shootings. There was a suicide in my community, the second in as many months. XNY is a chance to let grief have its momen. ADHD and, I suspect, modern life itself make it difficult to attend to grief in a sustained way, so we ‘forget to remember’ — phrasing I borrow from David McDiarmid’s memorable aphorism.
Thinking ahead
I’m pretty firm about not doing any actual work during XNY but during this liminal time I am constantly thinking about the year ahead. Not in terms of productivity goals I need to hit, or deadlines and other similar demands. Rather, consistent with the Taoist notion of doing by not-doing, I’m thinking about how I might use my freedom, agency and creativity to explore and experiment with different approaches to tricky situations.
My friends Nat and Kath and I have a New Year tradition of picking a theme for the year ahead. This is very different from making resolutions. (Attempts to bind your future self will always fail because that person has full authority to say ‘fuck you, I don’t wanna.’) A theme is just a generative principle you can draw on when you’re planning or problem solving. A couple of years ago I was feeling some urgency to move on from my role at work, even though I’d just won a heap of funding for work I was passionate about.
My theme for that year was commitment. I didn’t just go ‘oh well I’d better stick it out, then, because I said this year I would be committed.’ That would be an example of a binding resolution that limits action, rather than a generative theme that opens up your sense of possibility. The theme made me ask myself what working in my role fulfils — the wellspring of the commitment. The work does things for me personally — most importantly, it’s never boring — but it also fulfils a strongly felt commitment to the communities of interest that sustain me.
Wrapping up
Can we agree the best gift wrap is the box or bubble-wrap the item came in? Nobody is ever going to wrap it neater than that. If it’s not pretty enough, put a nice ribbon around it. That’s it for me — all the best in 2026.