How do you get through the holidays after someone dies?

There is no single method. Some families keep every tradition exactly the same as a way of keeping the person present, others change the whole holiday because the old version is too hard to repeat. Both are common, and what works can change from year to year.

Should we leave an empty chair at the table for someone who died?

Some families do, as a deliberate acknowledgment of who is missing, and some clear the place instead because the empty chair is harder to sit near than an ordinary gap. There is no correct choice, only what the people at that particular table can manage that particular year.

The holidays, with a chair empty

The table still knows the number it used to seat.

Someone always did the seating. Or the stuffing, made a specific way that nobody wrote down because writing it down would have meant admitting it might one day need to be written down. Or the phone call to relatives scattered across time zones, made every year on the same afternoon, coordinated by one person who is not there to coordinate it this time. The holidays run on a hundred small pieces of infrastructure that one person quietly held together, and the first year without them, all of it becomes visible at once, either by falling apart or by someone else scrambling to hold it.

A table with a fixed number of places

Even if you add a chair, subtract a chair, rearrange the whole table so the gap does not stare at anyone, everyone sitting there still knows the count that used to be right. Some families leave the seat empty on purpose, a place setting with nobody behind it. Some clear it away entirely and feel worse for the tidiness. Neither is wrong. What nobody manages is a table that simply does not notice the difference, because a family that size does not exist anymore, whatever the seating chart says.

The traditions only worked because someone ran them

It is easy to think of a tradition as belonging to the holiday itself, the tree, the specific side dish, the order the presents got opened in. Usually it belonged to a person. They bought the same size tree every year. They insisted on the too early start on the morning of, or the specific playlist, or the walk after dinner that nobody else particularly wanted to take but did anyway because they asked. Without them, the tradition does not run itself. Someone now has to decide, every year, whether to keep doing it exactly as it was, change it, or let it go, and that decision can feel like a small second loss stacked on the first.

What people do with the gap

There is no consensus, and that is fine. Some people keep every detail the same, on purpose, as a way of keeping the person present in the only form still available. Some people change everything, a different house, a different day, because the old version was unbearable to attempt. Some leave early, or do not host, or skip the year entirely and pick it back up later. Grief on a shared occasion can feel especially isolating when everyone at the table is also grieving, differently, and nobody can carry anyone else's version of it. The holidays also have a way of dragging grief back up that had seemed to quiet down, which is not a setback, just how grief tends to behave when it comes back years later. Whatever you do with the chair this year, you are allowed to do it differently the next.

Pick up the Wind Phone

Say what you need to say. The line is connected to nothing: no one hears you, nothing is recorded, nothing is stored.