What do I tell my kids when they ask why we still do the holiday thing if nobody actually wants to be there?

The honest answer is that nobody is making you. Not the calendar, not your dead grandmother's china, not the word tradition itself — which is just a name we give to choices we've stopped admitting we're still making. Your kids are watching you perform obligation and calling it love, and some part of them already knows the difference; that's why they're asking. Sartre was unsparing here: bad faith is not lying to others, it's lying to yourself about your own freedom. You could stop. You haven't. Tell them that — that you keep going because you chose to, or stop going because you chose to. Either way, own it in front of them. The only inheritance worth leaving is the demonstration that a human being can act deliberately rather than by reflex.

“Existence precedes essence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said sil al-rahim — maintain the ties of kinship — and he said it knowing that easy relationships need no commandment. You do not legislate what is already pleasant. That pain you feel in the room, the too-long silences, the smiles that cost something — that is not evidence that the gathering is broken; it is evidence that it is real, that these people are genuinely yours, which is heavier than strangers and holier than comfort. Tell your children: we go because what Allah commands as obligation is always precisely the thing that costs us something, because the weight of the thing is what makes it transformative. A family that only gathers in gladness is not a family tested. A family that gathers anyway is one that can hold you when the world cannot.

“Whoever severs the ties of kinship will not enter Paradise.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari, 5984

Nobody wants to be there. The turkey is dry. Aunt Carol is wrong about everything. Go anyway. Camus was clear that the absurd does not dissolve when you stare at it — it sharpens. The universe offers no justification for gathering around a table with people whose politics exhaust you, whose grief sits in the room like a fifth guest nobody invited. That's precisely why gathering becomes an act of defiance rather than obligation. You show up not because it will be good, not because this year will be different — it won't — but because the absurd demands witnesses, and your children are learning the most important lesson available to them: love is not the feeling of wanting to be somewhere. It is the decision to be somewhere anyway, lucid about the cost, undistracted by hope.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The candle doesn't want to be lit — and yet the room would be darker without even that reluctant flame. Zen does not traffic in explanations, because explanation is the mind's way of staying outside the experience rather than inside it. Tell your children what is simply true: your grandmother's hands are setting out the same chipped bowl she has set out for forty years, and those hands are running out of winters. The ritual is not about want. It is about showing up while there is still someone to show up for. A koan is a question that burns the one who holds it; your child's question is a koan. Don't answer it away. Sit with it at the table. Pass the bowl. Let the candle be lit.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

— Zen proverb

Your children just said the only true thing spoken in that house in three days, and you know it — you felt it land in your sternum the moment they said it. Everyone at that table is performing wanting to be there, which is harder work than the actual wanting, and children haven't learned yet to perform convincingly. That is not their failure; that is their remaining integrity. Diogenes didn't haul his barrel to the marketplace to make people comfortable. He hauled it there to make people honest. The barrel is warmer than the dining room precisely because nothing false is required of you inside it. Tell your kids: we are practicing honesty. Then, for once, mean it. Let the performance drop. See what's actually in the room once the pretending stops.

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”

— Diogenes of Sinope, as recorded by Diogenes Laërtius