I'm just gonna let James Hollis cover the holiday/family/shadow issue. There's no one one better qualified, or more truthful, for the job. And this stuff is big. It's old, it's mostly unconscious, and it's BIG.

The following excerpt is from Hollis' book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

 

"We all know that the normative power, the ingrained authority, and the stability of all great institutions — the church, the government, and the family — have undergone substantive, progressive enervation over the past two centuries, and are today most commonly attended by nostalgia, cynicism, habit and rootlessness. The first, nostalgia, is epitomized by the now banal songs that assault one beginning in November, such as "I'll Be Home for Christmas." Most of my clients have unhappy memories of the holidays. Or they have inordinate hopes for what can be repaired in their families and are always disappointed, or they are re-exposed at holiday time to those familiar dynamics lingering with them as pathologies, or they miss those who have died or from whom they have been estranged. Not the pretty picture one would expect based on the commercialized versions one sees on television! As with the fantasy of romantic love, perhaps the idealized family fails because we ask too much of it.

This very afternoon I sat with a man in his late forites, just back from a holiday visit to his extended family of origin. His scattered tribe had gathered from distant places and brought all their familiar madness with them. This tiime, Father was dead. Mother was now, finally, benign, half-senile, half the viper she once was. One brother was drifting through an alcoholic haze, another addicted to video games. One sister was having affairs with two different married men. Only one sister was willing to talk with my client about his life. I told him that he was a survivor, and that he was entitled to echo the words of Job, "I only have alone escaped to tell thee." He asked me, "How many of my family can I save?" And I said, "One. And I'm talking to him." Battered as he had been by their substance abuse, their continual denigration, and their mis-use of fundamentalistic guilt, he had in turn found intimacy with others so risky that, lonely as he was, he had never managed to commit himself to another. So much for over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go.

What then, in this current era, with its mobility, its transience, and its anonymity, might family be, and what is reasonable to ask of it? How is family to serve the task of soul building? While the family as institution was historically necessary for survival, the protection of children, and the transmission of cultural values, I am not always ready today to venerate the idea of family naively, for I have seen where family can also be a vehicle of tyranny, a sanctioned mode of constriction, and the inhibitor of developmental needs to the individual.

…we are obliged to ask tough questions of family in order to see if the institution in each particular instance serves the soul. We have to ask, "Does each person receive affirmation and support in being different, or is the price of being in the family conformity, the subversion of the agenda for individual growth that each of us brings into this world?" Just as each marriage has the right to ask fidelity, loyalty to the task of the marriage, and the willingness to work at resolution of discord, so every family has the right to ask the full participation of each member in the life of the family. Yet all marriage and family therapists know that family interactions are typically arrayed around its most damaged member. Except in the case of a catastrophic illness of a child, that damaged member is inevitably one of the parents, or sometimes both of them in their pas de deux. When I hear someone waxing sentimentally about family, I often detect nostalgia for what family is supposed to mean, rather than what they experienced.

Don't suppose that I am negative toward, or cynical in approaching, the idea of family. Yes, it's true that as a therapist I am almost daily in the thick of trying to repair some of the hurt that family has brought to the life of the person sitting before me. But in my own family I have also experienced, and been immeasurably enriched by, being loved beyond my merit, having others sacrifice on my behalf, and knowing there were those who worried for me as I made my bumbling way through the world. My point is rather that I believe nothing can escape the realistic scrutiny of consciousness. Of every family we must ask, "How well did the soul flourish here? How much life was lost through the failure of modeling a larger life, granting permission to follow one's own course, or was constricted by the glass ceiling of familial fears and limitations?" 

—Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, How to Finally, Really Grow Up, James Hollis, PhD, pgs. 129-131

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." –opening lines of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy