esrosedotblog

AWAY AND GONE

I love this little article.

Our Family Christmas Rescinded

I am totally with this older mother. There comes a time to step away from it all. The noise, the chaos, the frantic giving and receiving.

I have done it. And not to everyone's approval either. Not by a long shot.

In fact, we moved away from it. 3000 miles. Not just for that obviously. Warm weather had a lot to do with it too.

I even hate to write this, in a way, as it makes explicit has been fairly obvious but undercover in our family for awhile. A sentimental attachment to times that were but not nearly as "were" as we remember them.

Of course to kids it is all magic. I have my memories too.

But I also remember the stuff I got I didn't really want or the annual fight between my mom and dad over the tree he got us or the enforced run to relatives' houses every year, a circuit of excess. And, of course love. But you have to take the "bitter" with the better.

And eventually, the bitter adds up. Or rather the investment of all that energy doesn't return.

In our own family we celebrated with our kids jointly and then, as the kids got older, with their participation in our life in Boston. It was fun. A packed open house for Christmas eve. A hundred and more friends.

That was the first thing to go. One year it just got old.

Then after that, little by little, the enrichment of grandchildren, happy faces, helped spice it up. And then, well, we got older and it became something of a chore.

There is no explaining this to the young. Sometimes there is no explaining even to a spouse. The old magic lies there below the skin ready to erupt in a burst of unhappiness that it is gone or with some grandiose scheme to recapture.

It is probably not too different than an elephant's fondness for an old watering hole that went dry. Hard to move on. But you better move on or you will die of thirst.

This year, I am still thinking about whether to have anything special for dinner on the day. I am going to sit in an "alcathon" room which will be open all night for others who are having the same withdrawal symptoms, a sad wish for a different time that may or may not have been. I have no antidote but I do know that some empathy for others is a good way to handle my own.

How morose for the holiday? Huh? Sorry if it is a downer. It doesn't feel like one. More like a liberation from the old myths and memories.

Labels: holidays