This Year, I Didn’t Post My Christmas Gifts

Social media is a strange and powerful place. It is where we announce engagements and heartbreaks, post hospital bracelets and graduation caps, share recipes, baby photos, vacation sunsets, and the carefully curated versions of our lives that we hope the world will understand as “us.” It is a digital town square where grief, joy, envy, humor, anger, and hope all exist on the same scrolling feed. I love social media. I use it every day. I believe in its ability to connect people across impossible distances, to mobilize communities, and to amplify voices that would otherwise go unheard.

But this year, something in me shifted.

December on the internet is loud and dazzling. It glows with ornaments, matching pajamas, stacks of presents, twinkling lights, and carefully framed happiness. There is nothing wrong with that. Celebration is beautiful. Gratitude is healthy. But as the weeks passed and my feed filled with gift exchanges and family portraits, I felt an ache that would not leave me. I could not stop thinking about the families who were not celebrating. The mothers refreshing missing persons pages. The fathers keeping their phones charged through the night. The children who had learned to live with absence long before they learned to understand it.

So I made a decision. This year, I did not post my Christmas gifts. Instead, I spent the holiday season uploading the faces and stories of more than one hundred missing and unsolved murdered women and men. Their names filled my feed. Their eyes stared back at anyone willing to stop scrolling. Their stories demanded space in a season that too often moves too quickly past pain.

While others were posting what they received, I posted who we had lost.

The work was heavy. It was emotional. I read case after case of girls who vanished on their way home from school, mothers who never returned from errands, sons who disappeared into ordinary afternoons and were never seen again. I studied photographs taken decades apart. I learned about unidentified women buried beneath temporary names. I listened to families who had been begging for attention for years, sometimes for generations. And I wrote. Every single day. Because forgetting is the most dangerous form of violence there is.

Something unexpected happened as those stories accumulated. People stopped scrolling. Strangers messaged me saying they recognized a face. Friends shared posts they normally would have passed by. Conversations started. Awareness spread. Attention, I realized again, is the most valuable currency in any investigation. A missing person is not found by algorithms. They are found because someone remembers something. A name triggers a memory. A photograph jogs a buried thought. A story lands in the right place at the right moment and everything changes.

Social media is not shallow by nature. What we choose to amplify is what gives it meaning. This year, I chose to amplify the missing.

I did not cancel Christmas. My children still laughed. My house was still warm. We were still together. There were still presents under the tree and memories being made that I will cherish forever. But I did not feel compelled to photograph it. The love in my home does not vanish because I did not post it. But the stories of the missing vanish when we do not tell them.

When you spend enough time with this work, it changes you. You carry the grief of families you have never met. You think about the mother who still sets a place at the table. You think about the sister who has aged while her sibling remains frozen in time. You think about the child who was supposed to grow up. You begin to understand that joy and responsibility are not opposites. They can exist together. They must.

The holidays magnify everything. Happiness becomes brighter. Loss becomes sharper. Silence becomes unbearable. That is why this season mattered so much to me. Because while the world was celebrating what it had, I wanted it to remember who was still missing.

I believe deeply in hope. But hope must be built on action. Posting those stories was my action. It was my way of telling the families I see them. Of telling the missing they are not forgotten. Of telling the world that these lives mattered just as much as any celebration.

This year, my gift to the world was attention. Attention for the forgotten. Attention for the families still living between hope and grief. Attention for the names that deserve to be spoken until the truth is known.

And next year, and the year after that, I will keep choosing this work. Because joy is not fragile. But memory is. And I choose to protect it.