Resurrecting old Christmas traditions
I don’t care about most of the personal-historical details that other people seem to really care about. My Irish-EnglishGerman-ish heritage doesn’t interest me and I don’t feel any particular affection for someone I’ve just met who also happens to be from my hometown.
What I do care about, despite all of that, is traditions — the rites and rituals that are ancient in an immediate family and usually so idiosyncratic they are unintelligible to outsiders. These traditions look like they could be anything at all, but mean everything.
In my family, growing up, the vast majority of traditions happened around Christmas, probably because my sisters have 10 years on me and the only time we were all reliably together was the stretch between Dec. 24 and 26. As a kid, Christmas was a three-daylong fairy tale, presaged by the ceremonial “stocking draw” on Thanksgiving. (”Ceremonial” because my mom would shop for the stocking of whoever’s name I ended up with, and because the draw was usually fixed.)
The red-velvet curtains parted on Christmas Eve, when my sisters and I got to wear new dresses and shiny shoes and scratchy nylons — this was before I found out you could buy Wolford tights, soft as air — to our church’s evening service, and hold flickering thin, white tapers during “Silent Night,” lifting them wobbily into the air during the final verse. The church’s sanctuary, as familiar as our own living room, became enchanted with evergreens and candlelight and the feeling of so many people we knew, pressed warmly beside each other in a millefeuille of wool sweaters and tulle. After, we went home to eat the Christmas-specific hors d’oeuvres and baked goods — this was before I found out you could buy brie cheese or jam cookies any day of the year — all with their own familyfabled pasts.
Until I was a Cool Teen and refused, we sang carols, not around the piano exactly, but in its general proximity.
On Christmas Day, no one was allowed to go downstairs until my mother had made coffee, which, ugh, but fine, and then we opened stockings and presents, one by one, one item at a time, for an eternity and infinity of oohs and ahhs. Like most kids, I was an acquisitive hound and would arrange my gifts on my bed just so for evaluation and documentation, and then spend the rest of the day with my best friend Allie, who had done the same. We had a traditional Christmas dinner, and then spent Boxing Day reading new books and crafting meals out of stocking chocolate and leftovers.
The rites and rituals of our Christmases loosely adhered to a standard, suburban, semisecular, semi-Christian Westernworld holiday experience, but they were crucially ours. Every moment, even a dumb one, involved a kind of processional, the recalled memories of earlier iterations of the tradition, and mandatory participation. I’m sure I feel even more strongly about the traditions now that we’re mostly without them.
It’s been a while, maybe a decade, since my family celebrated like this. The treasured series of traditions was abruptly and forever changed when my sister missed Christmas to go on a literal safari with her new in-laws — a thoroughly understandable betrayal.
Later, accommodations were made for our family’s expansions and additions, and eventually, excuses were made about my nieces and nephews not wanting to go to church, as if any of us ever “wanted” to go.
The traditions came apart, as everything does, slowly and then all at once.
We’re all the same, but without the confirmation of collectivity and belonging, it’s all different.
But this year, my husband’s rescheduled knee-replacement surgery meant the cancellation of our planned Christmas vacation.
So instead of walking quietly through a series of New York galleries and museums, I’ll be celebrating a Classic Carraway Christmas with (most of ) my immediate family, knee permitting.
This silver lining of silver bells includes the biggest Christmas tree I can fit in my house, hitting up a random church for carols and other city-scale versions of my family’s traditions. Most importantly, I’ve designated myself the host of an old-school Christmas Eve, and I already have the enormous, festive earrings to prove it. For my husband — whose family Christmases are loud and informal (fun, but a different version of fun than ours) — explanations of why it’s important to wear and do and eat specific things, especially when it’s just us, don’t resonate. Most families experience some internal tension around traditions — what’s valuable, and what isn’t — and we’re no different. To me, it’s about consciously creating an atmosphere, and showing respect for the differences of a day; he wants to wear hoodies and hang out.
Fortunately, he’s sweet, and will do what I want — and what I want to do, to recreate the comfort of family and the actual magic of Christmas, is everything.