Grief at Christmas after losing your parents doesn't take the year off, and it doesn't stop after the first one. It's heavy, it's strange, and every so often it's darkly funny. Members of the Dead Parents Club tend to get through it with lower expectations, a few odd rituals of their own, and each other.

If you have no home to go home to for Christmas because your parents have died, the honest answer is that you build one, slowly, starting with a single gathering, meal or ritual this year. It won't replace the home you lost. But over time it can become a place where you, and the people you love, belong.

When both of your parents have died, the holidays lose their home base. There's no house to drive back to, and nobody whose job it is to gather everyone. What gets you through is deciding early who hosts now, being honest with the family you have left, and slowly building a season that fits the life you're actually living.