“This Ancestor Stayed Home…”
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
This time of year, it’s not uncommon to read or hear about stories of families going through the traditional “who will we spend Christmas with this year” as they negotiate the demands from different family members. This makes me think of something my family got right about this issue. It involves people staying home without anyone judging them for it.
This started, I think, because from the mid-1940s my parents lived completely across the country from where their other family members were – mostly in Tucson, Arizona. “Going home” for Christmas was simply not an option. I remember spending one Christmas with Tucson relatives.
For every other year, we made our own Christmas “traditions” in Virginia. This sometimes (but not always) involved one great-aunt who lived in Arlington, and at various times incorporated various neighbors. My parents decided very early on that they would have Christmas Dinner on Christmas Eve, leaving Christmas Day as a more relaxing day for everyone in the family.
When Tim and I had children, we were living near both sets of our parents. However, we established – again, early on – that the kids would have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at home. Our parents developed a pattern of coming to visit us on Christmas Day. One set of parents would come in the late morning, the other would come mid-afternoon or so. This didn’t mean that they were avoiding each other – it just meant that each set of grandparents could have time with their grandchildren.
Tim’s parents both died in the early 1980s. My parents moved to Madison, Virginia, in 1986. So we had to come up with new traditions. We still wanted the kids to have Christmas at home, but we also wanted to see extended family over the holiday. I don’t remember whether this was intentional when it started, but we began to focus on getting together in Madison for my parents’ wedding anniversary. They were married on December 28, 1940, and getting together during the week after Christmas worked for all of us – including the families of my brother and sister, who lived in other states but almost always found a way to travel to Virginia for a few days around December 28. That’s when we opened family Christmas presents – my father serving as “Santa” until he passed away in 2001, and then my brother or some grandchild served as “Santa.” We had developed the tradition of opening presents in turn – I think this happened first when we were little kids, because my parents couldn’t afford a lot of presents and they wanted to prolong the present-opening phase of the day. As we grew up, the number of presents increased but the ceremonial opening of the presents continued. This would often take an hour or more, as we all watched other family members open their presents and we all got the opportunity to appreciate what gifts were given and how family members reacted to the gifts. Multiple cups of coffee were often consumed while this was going on.
After my mother died in 2012, we abandoned these Christmas get-togethers. I don’t recall ever deciding that this was what we were going to do. My sister and her husband, who had moved in with our Mom to help her for the last six years of her life, had children (and soon grandchildren) of their own, and they wanted to give them the “stay at home” Christmas that we had grown up with.
Meanwhile, as our two children became adults with children and other family responsibilities, our new tradition is that we go to our son’s house in Georgia for Christmas. Our daughter, who has dogs but not children, usually joins us for a few days. We have our own traditions there that we have developed over the years. We always play charades during one evening when we’re there. We laugh a whole lot. Our son reads “Twas the Night Before Christmas” to the children (now lanky teenagers who don’t fit on his lap anymore) while the rest of us sit and look adoringly at the scene. In the morning, we stay in our bedrooms until my son and daughter-in-law go to the family room, turn on the lights, and start the coffee. Then we all open our Christmas stockings and have a bit of breakfast before adjourning to the living room, where either our son or one of our grandchildren plays “Santa” and we enjoy the present opening process for a good part of the rest of the morning. Then we have a breakfast casserole, mimosas for the adults, and more coffee. If the weather is nice in Georgia when we’re there, some of these events take place outside on their patio.
This doesn’t happen every Christmas. Sometimes our son and his family decide to spend Christmas with our daughter-in-law’s family, who live just a few hours away. In the years when this happens, they invite us for Thanksgiving (which coincides with our granddaughter’s birthday) and we do “Christmas” a month early. See above.
And what do we do when we “stay home” at Thanksgiving – which happens most of the time? We plan a nice staycation week. This year we’re planning to attend several concerts and other seasonal events in our community. First of all, one of us assumes responsibility for planning and preparing a Thanksgiving Day dinner. We alternate weeks cooking, and Thanksgiving falls in Tim’s week this year. So he has planned what we’re going to eat and he shopped for everything this weekend. The small turkey breast is thawing in the refrigerator as I write this. He has assigned me responsibility for the dinner rolls. I think I can do that. On Thanksgiving Day, I’ll serve as his sous-chef and do what he asks me to do. We also have plans to eat out a couple of times between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is a Big Deal for us because we don’t eat out very often. Each of us is planning to surprise the other in some way during this time – we tend to make games out of lots of routine decisions, and we enjoy surprising each other with unexpected adventures.
We’ll talk to our family members over Thanksgiving – usually some kind of video chat – and we’ll see everyone over the next month or so. This is fine with us. The bottom line is that this all works if you’re not hung up on family gatherings on a specific day. The important thing is that everyone feels nurtured and cared for at all times of the year, not just at Christmas.
Very nice. For a moment, I thought you had one of my family photos from 1956. I'm sure I have one almost exactly like yours. Ha!
Over the years, when younger couples have asked me what advice I have for those getting married, it has always been to do what you did ... children home for Christmas. We all see so many families who spend way too much emotional energy negotiating who goes to whose parents' home for what holiday, and someone always being disappointed. Like you, my nuclear family lived 500 miles from my grandparents and didn't have time or money for a major trip mid-winter, so when I was grown i didn't want to travel, even tho it has always been just the two of us. Glad to learn that we are not the only ones with this tradition, and glad that you seem to have passed it on to the next generation. Happy Thanksgiving to you and Tim, and to the extended members of your clan.