The holidays

If I were being honest, I’d have to say that I haven’t really felt the same about the holidays since my father died, which was a long time ago. At some point in the very early ’70s, Christmas eve became a gathering at our house to which all sorts of family, extended family, former family, etc. were all invited, and over the course of an evening 30 to 40 people might come and go. I’m not sure just when lasagna became part of it, but it is, and I remember a disastrous year when my mother decided she was not making 5 or 6 trays of lasagna and substituted something else — grown men were practically in tears. My mom’s sister started making creampuffs, and somehow they got there every year whether she did or not. So Christmas eve always meant family, lasagna and creampuffs. Individual faces changed, people came and went, but the core families were always there. It was a very informal gathering, though on occasion my father was moved to say a word or two. It was a chance to stay up late and listen to the grownups talk (my cousins were all much younger than I was), and to me it was as important as Christmas day; maybe moreso. The year my father died (he died in September 1985) was the first year I ever missed it — Christmas fell on a Wednesday that year (like this year), and I was backed up at work and really couldn’t take extra time, and it just didn’t seem worth making the trip, so my mother and sister came out to Syracuse the weekend before and they went on and had Christmas eve without me, which was fine with me because the truth was that I couldn’t face Christmas eve without my father that year.
But the tradition went on, and the other men who had been important to me growing up were still there, and it was a chance to see them again, but I felt my father’s absence acutely. We all started having kids, which brought some spark back to the thing, but there was more loss — Hank died, then Jimmy. Duane moved away. Both my grandparents and my great grandmother died. Two years ago, my mother did something only slightly less unthinkable than not making lasagna — she moved. Not far, but still, when someone shifts from a house she’s been in for 40 years, it’s surprising. Now Christmas eve is almost entirely made up of folks from my mom’s side of the family, my cousins and their kids (though not all of them, depending on who has custody over the holidays. Modern life).
And it is joyous. The girls dress up and scurry around, passing out little presents, getting each other all wound up, chasing their cousins up and down the stairs and staying up too late. There’s lasagna and creampuffs (I abstain from the latter, but not the former). But running through it is the ones we’ve lost, the ones I miss, especially my father. I wish he were here to see these little wonders we’re rearing, that he could have been some piece of their lives. I wish there had been more time for us together.
But this is the way of things, meetings and partings, and we can’t let the ghosts of the past prevent us from being in the present, hard as that may be sometimes.