The Calico Pen: Family rituals important part of holiday season
This time of the year it seems that there are just not enough hours in the day or enough days in the month to do all that we want to do, or all that we “should” do.
The tribes will be gathering soon, and like the wind in our part of the state, some will blow in unannounced. We welcome the newest babe, the matriarchs and patriarchs, and all those in between with the familiar rituals that our family has called “our way.”
And if we don’t the cry will go up, “But we have always done it that way.”
Rituals do lend to the uniqueness of a family and they help define the connectedness. Holidays provide opportunities for family members to participate in those rituals in ways that reaffirm their commitments.
Mothers often measure the passage of time with holiday memory markers. 1955? “Oh, that was the year our oldest learned to walk. We had to put the tree in the playpen to keep him away from it.”
“Remember how bad the winter of 1979 was? That was when the kids told us we were going to be grandparents. The snowman that they built during their Thanksgiving visit was still in the yard when the baby was born the next spring.”
“Our next door neighbors, now close friends, moved here the year that the kids frosted the sugar cookies with undiluted food coloring. The carolers who stopped at our house for cocoa and cookies trooped to the next house to sing with purple and red teeth.”
Baby’s first Christmas. The cradle-shaped ornament, dated 1961, triggers memories of a little blond boy all dressed up in a French-blue Eton suit. He slept, with a thumb in his mouth, through midnight Mass. The loss of a family member sometimes necessitates restructuring of familiar rituals.
His death brought numbness that was mirrored in the carelessly hung tinsel on an unwanted tree. Christmas afternoon we removed the wreath from our front door and drove to the barren cemetery to put the wreath on his grave. We have kept that ritual. The wreath, a symbol of the circle of life, has provided our family with a way to retain our connectedness.
While our son was bedridden, the last year of his short life, he painted some stained glass Christmas ornaments. Over the last two decades I have tucked one of those ornaments in the Christmas packages so that all the children and their children, and soon-to-be great-grandchildren, will have one.
Sure, the holidays are a lot of work, but the memory markers, and the memory makers, are what define the particulars of the group of people called family.
(Carol Holoboff is a former Libby resident who now writes her column from Great Falls).