'Tis the season to be jolly. Or depressed. Or overwhelmed. Or just plain over it. For all its reputation as a joyful time, the holiday season can be a serious emotional drain.

For many, Christmas represents the promise of peace and goodwill, but behind the decorations and family traditions is a dark underpinning triggered by the holiday season. This sadness, often referred to as holiday depression, can be incredibly challenging for LGBTQ+ people who experience rejection from their given family based upon their sexual orientation or gender identity. So while most Americans are preparing to execute their holiday traditions, others are preparing to wage an internal war under the societal expectation of holiday cheer.

For Chancey Daniel, 31, a Marietta, GA native and doctoral student now residing in Montgomery, AL, the month of December is a painful reminder of the loss of his mother to multiple myeloma and his diagnosis of stage four throat and lung cancer the following year after her passing.

“It [depression] comes around November because Thanksgiving and Christmas are never the same,” Daniel says, referring to the season his mother fell gravely ill after battling cancer three times before ultimately succumbing to the disease in February 2017.

Between December 2019 and May 2020, Joshua Henry Jenkins, co-creator of “Black, Gay, stuck at home,” lost two of his closest Black queer friends—Dr. Louis F. Graham, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Policy at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Marcus R. White, an Assistant Professor of Dance at Arizona State University. The sudden loss was incomprehensible and rippled throughout the marginalized and artistic communities in which their work was rooted, specifically, but not limited to the cities of Chapel Hill and Greensboro, where Jenkins first encountered the former romantic partners as undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill during the early stages of creating KuchuQwanzaa—a 7-day celebration and expression of Black LGBTQ+ cultural principles, values, and ideals that expands on the more widely known Kwanzaa celebration from December 26, to January 1.

“The idea of interrogating or flipping Kwanzaa on its head to be Black and queer meant that Louis [Graham] and Marcus [White] wanted to also interject those ideologies into the name,” Jenkins says.

As we approach the beginning of the holiday season and the last weeks before the start of a new year, it’s imperative that we begin to give thanks, not just on the official holiday but every day throughout the year. If you’re reading this, congratulations, you’re still surviving a pandemic that has taken over 5 million lives globally nearly two years after its emergence. That alone is a reason to give thanks. But let’s be clear, Black gay men were navigating an epidemic and a host of other challenges before COVID-19 arrived, which can often make it difficult to exist in a continuous space of gratitude. But it is not impossible. It is an intentional act to choose joy and gratitude, especially in the midst of life’s challenges. “If you can change your mind, you can change your life,” wrote philosopher William James.