This Christmas, our family got together for a dinner.
People walked in and out from 5pm to 9pm. Food was laid out buffet-style in the kitchen; eat as you want. I think my mom said a prayer and the grazing started. The food included snack sandwiches from Chick-fil-a, three pre-made trays from the local grocery store, store-bought dip, and exactly two homemade dishes.
Grandpa distributed checks to everyone. My aunt waited for someone to notice that she was engaged, which nearly didn’t happen until the end and happened with as minimal of a ruckus as possible. Then everyone left.
As it was going on and after it happened, I was struck how empty it all seemed. I shouldn’t complain; at least I have a family to gather with – more than my dad can say now. But at the same time, aside from gathering, it didn’t feel like much was going on.
Family culture and traditions are hard; they take work. They take planning, preparation, going to the grocery, sticking to it when no one else wants to anymore, motivating people like me to get up and do something. And they usually take a strong woman to keep them going.
Maybe this loss of culture is bigger than just my family. As our lives get more and more convenient, we gratefully give more and more of them over corporations and technology who want to do the work for us for a reasonable fee. Anytime something gets hard, it probably isn’t worth it anymore. We get used to easy. And anything that isn’t easy is harder than it used to be.
Previously, on Thanksgiving, Grandma and Grandpa gave all the kids a new ornament to hang on our trees, and we drew names for gifts – all the cousins in one hat, and all the aunts and uncles in another. We spent the rest of Thanksgiving trying to figure out who had whose name.
Christmas was never celebrated on Christmas day because my Grandmother was a saint and always worked around the family schedules of everyone else. When we did get together, it was always at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We would play with cousins as usual. One year we dared each other to walk out on the frozen pond out back in the new subdivision that was being built.
If there was a gift we were particularly proud of that we had gotten earlier in the week, we would bring it and show it off. One cousin brought a Vanilla Ice cassette. I had no idea what that name could possibly mean and why it was such a big deal. Pretty sure New Kids on the Block made an appearance one Christmas. As my younger cousins got older, they brought their handheld video game players and didn’t interact with anyone.
Before the big gift exchange, Grandpa would read the Christmas story from Luke. Then someone would get the first gift of Christmas, which always was a camera. Then, baby gifts for anyone under 5. Then the cousin exchange. Then the adult exchange. Grandma used the same huge big blue holiday bag for at least eight years in a row for gifts that were too big. Basketballs were pretty easy to spot in the wrapping. Not too much cash or gift cards, though that started showing up later.
Then it was time for dinner. Grandpa prayed “for the nourishment of our bodies”, and then everyone went in the kitchen and filled their plate with homemade food – ham, corn, potatoes, salad, Grandma’s yeast rolls. Cousins ate wherever we could find room. There were little card tables spread out around the whole house. Adults were mostly at the big dining room table.
After dinner, we played board games and euchre like a good Midwest family. Then we travelled home.
As the family grew, we had to stop meeting at Grandma and Grandpa’s house because there weren’t enough seats. Then we decided to stop the gift exchange, partly because it was too expensive for some and partly because we didn’t really need all that stuff. We switched to giving to a charity, which was a cool idea. But the Christmas story didn’t get read all the time after that. I moved away and wasn’t there for a long time, so I can’t track all the details, but later Grandma died and my cousins all got married, divorced, remarried, etc.
And somewhere along the way we got what happened this year.
My mom tries. She made Grandma’s rolls (one of the two homemade dishes). She made the German cookies that are the only thread of culture left from my dad’s side of the family that doesn’t even get together.
But still, it feels that we’ve lost our culture. Maybe it’s the natural decaying process that is supposed to birth new mini-cultures around it. Maybe it’s the truth that culture lies heavily on the back of the matriarchs and with my Grandmother not there anymore it all crumbles away.
But I fear it’s worse than that.
Traditions are hard. Mama’s family does them better. I hope to do them better and more intentional with our small family. I keep waiting until we are ‘settled’ which is legitimate, but hell, I’m also 32 now, which is about as settled as you can be.
The best news in this whole story is that during my culture-less Christmas, you guys were playing completely independent of what the adults were doing. You had your own universe going on, just like I remembered. So maybe one day you can chastise me for taking the culture out of what you remembered.
Till then, please put up with my feeble attempts to reconstruct something.