Just me and 80 friends and relatives

It seems like a simple question, this one I’ve asked periodically over the years: Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if we just chipped in and hired a caterer, or got some trays of affordable takeout, for our big Christmas party, rather than preparing, serving and cleaning up after a fullon turkey dinner?

The answer, from my parents and others in my extended family, seems equally simple: No. No! Nope nope nope. Stop asking that.

Figuring out why that’s the answer, and the emotions behind it, is a little more complicated. At least for a bonehead like me.

Some background: The Christmas party I’m talking about is the grand extended-family bash in my father’s branch of our tree. It isn’t a small gather- ing. My father has eight sisters, all of whom had children (some a lot of children), most of whom now have children of their own, and all but a handful of us still live in the Toronto area.

Including longtime friends of the family, teenage steady dates, roommates, a beloved ex-husband (and his wife and sometimes his stepchildren), and depending on who’s working or out of town and the number of great-aunts or second cousins who come by, we typically have 60 to 80 people at the party. Even by the time I started school, the crowd had outgrown my Poppa’s house.

So for as long as I can remember, we’ve been renting the hall in the church in Riverdale where parts of four generations of Keenans have been parishioners and marked milestones — baptisms, weddings, school graduations, funerals. And Christmas. Or, more precisely, Boxing Day.

The Keenan clan’s annual Boxing Day get-together requires feats of logistics, cooking and cleaning. And they wouldn’t have it any other way

At about the time we moved to the church because the family was getting too big to sit around the dining room table, we realized the number of in-laws was making Christmas Day logistics tricky. So, we all forsook the great retail bargains that are the Canadian dayafter holiday pastime so that everyone could make it to our party. For as long as I can remember, Boxing Day has been the capstone of the weeklong Christmas ritual: after the pageants and midnight masses and Santa visits and a series of family meals, there was the Keenan Boxing Day party — the finish line, and in many years the main event. The place to show cousins who became best friends the haul from under the tree, and to run around in the spacious hall, to play. And to eat.

Over the years, besides the usual holiday cheer and My-how-you’vegrown and Yes-Kevin-graduatedthis-year and We’re-thinking-abouta-new-car catching up, we’ve occupied ourselves with various activities. For a few years, the children put on plays and skits. For a while, we had a year-in-review “Poppa Awards” ceremony. Some years we’ve played board games; one year we played casino games.

But the main event is dinner. We all sit down together and eat: turkey, mashed potatoes, roasted potatoes, the usual vegetables, sometimes unusual vegetables, cheese trays, pastries, dips, salads, ham, pasta, vegan and vegetarian eccentricities, burritos — the menu grows and grows.

This menu of dishes is maintained on a spreadsheet, and every year a volunteer co-ordinator figures out what everyone needs to bring and makes assignments or accepts volunteers. Some items people bring are smaller: frozen vegetables, or a bag of chips. Some are larger: a turkey big enough to feed 60. People can choose in a given year based on their financial and emotional resources, and mostly after a lot of confusing Facebook threads and email chains, it gets sorted.

But this is a sign of the thing that I and some of my generation noticed as we got older (that our parents were no doubt already well aware of ): a meal that size gets to be a lot of work. People work at home preparing food, and then in the few hours we have the hall, we arrive and set up tables and chairs and decorations and warming trays and so on; set the tables with cutlery and plates and glasses; reheat and otherwise finish off the food and then we eat, and then very soon we need to get to washing dishes and putting them away, putting all the tables and chairs back and sweeping and cleaning (and the requisite recruiting and pestering of sometimes reluctant volunteers to get on with these various jobs).

Which brings me back to my question: wouldn’t it be better to at least try something else? Either a caterer, or buying prepared food, or else moving to a lighter coffee-anddesserts-type party rather than a full-on buffet meal?

Wouldn’t it simply make for less stress and more time to visit and enjoy each other’s company? It seemed simply pragmatic — bowing to the reality of how big a family we’ve grown into. The move to the church hall was pragmatic. The switch to the Boxing Day date was pragmatic.

But the idea of simply buying prepared food or paying someone to wash the dishes for us: these are steps across some invisible line. There’s something sacred at stake that no one articulates when they flatly tell me “no.”

Maybe it’s because of things that, in some people’s minds and hearts, bind a family together. We have managed, in a way not all families do, to remain a tight-knit group across generations even as we’ve spread out to the corners of the city. We call each other to celebrate, to commiserate and to mourn. We help each other out of jams and get together to raise money for charities and school trips. We see each other and love each other, not just on holidays, but day to day. We remain, this ever-growing group, a family. Not just in name but in spirit and in action.

And families sit down at home and eat together. Especially at Christmas. Now that the last of us has moved out of the neighbourhood my father and his sisters and many of my cousins and I grew up in, this church is the closest thing we have to an extended family home — long after many of us stopped attending or practising or believing, this building remains a place as familiar and safe and comfortable for many of us as our own living rooms. So we sit down there to eat.

But it isn’t just the eating that’s important, it seems. It’s all that cooking and cleaning. Because maybe that is what binds families together, too: not just the celebrations, but the work they do together to give the celebrations meaning. The work isn’t distributed evenly — there are people who always pitch in to do what’s needed and people who always take on the job of cajoling others to help or who carry the worries and stresses while others barely notice. That’s how families are, too. But there are tasks to be done, and mostly we get them done.

Family isn’t just about showing up to the graduation ceremony and the wedding; it’s about changing diapers and nagging about homework and driving to the emergency room in the middle of the night. It’s about the things we do for each other, sure. But even more, it’s about the ways we work together for each other.

And for many families — certainly for this one — that working together begins with domesticity: cooking, setting the table, washing dishes. It’s a lot of work, and sometimes sharing it causes stress and feels like a grind. But it’s family work, at its most basic, and we still do it together, for each other.

It’s been a recipe for happy Boxing Days for decades. And every year it still feels like a gift. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire.