Christmas Is Interesting

So, Christmas is interesting. I grew up in a non-religious family, and have personally been an atheist since the concept of god was first foisted on me. Attempts were made, half-hearted attempts by parents who had no more interest in it than I did. While the tinges of religion were always on the edge of it, Christmas was a secular holiday for my family growing up, but still an important one. There were trees (live and then artificial) and lovely decorations, lights and wreaths and even a painted two-dimensional plywood Santa that hung on our front stoop and which one year my father, to my endless embarrassment, didn’t take down until Easter. Christmas was a big splurge of gifts in a family that hadn’t a lot of money to spare, where something as seemingly mandatory for childhood as a bicycle or even a baseball were considered big ticket items. But on Christmas, magic happened under the tree. My mother made sure of that.

It was also a time of internal peace in the family. From the time I was 9 or 10, my mother would host various members of the family on Christmas Eve, which for me became our real Christmas celebration. It started small, an aunt and uncle or two, but quickly grew into the entire extended family, sometimes 30 or more people crammed into our little house, even in the years when the downstairs was torn up for renovations. My mother prepared huge and numerous trays of lasagna and Italian sausages, her sister brought creampuff pastries, and the men all proudly and wildly overindulged in the food. To my recollection, the alcohol was relatively mild. (My father was a fairly controlled alcoholic who got himself to a certain level each and every day and rarely binged beyond that.) It was convivial, loving, a warm gathering that seemed to mean more than the various other family gatherings of the year.

There would come the moment when it was time for people to go home. In my teens, I’d go out and start cars for people to get them warmed up. They’d be parked all up and down our (usually) snow-lined street. And my father would come out, and we’d help the grandparents and others to their cars. And we would sit on the stoop together in the crisp night air (while he of course smoked cigarettes), and it would be good. We had done a thing together, without fighting. He wasn’t yelling at me or grumbling at me or beating me, and he wasn’t going to. I actually felt connected to him in those moments, and loved him.

Of course, as a teen, I thought I loved him all the time, despite it all, because society really impressed the necessity of loving your parents – no matter how poorly they treated you. Now I see it differently, and also recognize that in those rare moments of connection, as close to vulnerability as he could come I also began to see how small his world was and always would be, and started to have those dangerous teen feelings of pity for my own parent, of feeling superior or better in many ways. The normal stuff. But do I love him now, even with a huge recognition that he was born but not raised, that there was utterly no guidance in his own life that would have shown him how to do better? I have to say, I don’t.

My family provided a vastly better environment than either of my parents had known. But I didn’t understand how that still left mine different from the families of my friends – I couldn’t see it from the inside. In fact, I’m only coming to an understanding of it now, in the past few years, and that’s brought a lot of complicated feelings to the surface.

When we had our own kids (long after my father had died), Christmas mostly became an extension, a continuation, of each of our families’ traditions – mine a chaotic barrage of food, presents and noise, hers a carefully orchestrated and largely silent, reserved ordeal. And we just did that, and I didn’t recognize how much the chaos affected both my kids soon enough to make it stop – and really probably didn’t have the tools to make things happen another way. Even when we started hosting Christmas, it just meant the chaos came to us, either mixing the families or serially. And we still went to Christmas Eve every year, even though it should have been evident my kids didn’t get from it what I thought I did – and what I got was mostly the fond memories, because in the reality I found it largely overwhelming. Rarely did I even really say a word until the party had been whittled down to a remaining few.

Then nine years ago, our children nearly adults, we moved away from family and friends, and Christmas got insanely complicated – trying to manage aging parents, trying to see and include our kids who were now in college and post-college, having to find places to stay that met all our needs, working out food, trying to minimize the chaos and not really succeeding. We tried a bunch of different ways to celebrate the holiday, none of which really worked.

An elder care situation took us off the Christmas circuit in 2019, followed by two years of COVID lockdown, followed by last year’s actual COVID canceling everything. We moved our celebration to Martin Luther King Day weekend – booked an apartment, traveled with our younger to see our elder, invited my mother over and had a lovely gathering. Our kids seemed happy and relaxed, no one had to do too much of anything, we somehow worked out food, and it was all quite nice.

It was good that we planned to do the same thing again this year, as COVID has been canceling plans on us again anyway. Today our younger will join us and we’ll open a few presents and eat Lebanese takeout we picked up yesterday. Then in three weeks elder will come to us, and we’ll have a little celebration right here. When weather warms up (sorry, that’s what we used to say when winters were cold), and some other restrictions dissipate, we’ll head north and visit my mother. But for now, this will do.

After several years of really, truly dreading Christmas and everything to do with it, I’ve gotten to neutral. That’s probably as good as I can do for now, and that’s enough.