Raising Richmond: We’ll be home for Christmas
Changing families means changing traditions. Find out why one parent decided to put her proverbial foot down on holiday demands from the fam.
Here is a joke that the kids used to taunt me with on the school yard…
“Your family is so big, you have to rent out a club house in your grandparents’ neighborhood to fit everyone for Thanksgiving dinner.”
I had no snappy comebacks, as that is the truth. And also a terrible taunt.
My grandparents had 13 kids, and those kids had a whole mess of kids, and now those kids are having kids. And those kids have lots of great aunts’ and uncles’ names to remember. When I married into a normal-sized family it only increased the number of people I was related to by five percent.
I have happily spent decades of Thanksgivings and Christmases Day and Eve with dozens of people. When I spent my first holiday at my in-laws’ house, it was nice to be able to fit around one table and not eat buffet style. I went even further outside of tradition when my husband and I took our then one-year-old daughter out of town and spent Thanksgiving and the surrounding days at a friend’s house, which was calm and awesome.
After I got married, someone (I’m not naming names, but it rhymes with “smy smom”) told me to start my own traditions right away or else I never could. Our first was that my husband and I were going to wake up in our house on holidays. And when I started the tradition of alternating holidays with my and my husband’s families (which often meant we’d be out of town), smy smom countered-offered my traditions and requested that if we spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with one family, we then had to have Thanksgiving 2 or Christmas 2 with the other.
While I understood where she was coming from, this was not a practice that my husband and I really embraced. During the holidays we don’t get any extra time off than the day itself. Spending hours in a car and then having to do it again the next weekend with the other family was more hassle than honored tradition.
When I was a kid, my parents hosted the big family Christmas. We’d open presents and have a big breakfast, extended family arrived for dinner, and our friends would roll in around dessert. I loved it, but that version of Christmas ended when my parents moved and there was no “home” to go home to on Christmas Day until I owned my own house. With both sets of our parents living out of town, Christmas became a scramble to do something nice with my husband and daughter, then get in the car for two hours, hang out for a few hours more, spend two more hours in the car, clean up from the morning we had to scramble through, and get ready to go back to work the next day. Bah, humbug!
Last year after driving home to our house one Christmas–our second Christmas traveling with our daughter–I had an idea. “Let’s not travel on Christmas anymore,” I said to my husband. And there was much rejoicing.
We actually did Christmas Day by ourselves at home when our daughter was only eight weeks old, and that was really nice, especially for new parents with an infant. It was a lovely change of pace, and the day still felt special without other people involved. When I picture Christmas Day for my daughter, I want her to have fun and make some memories that don’t involve a 200-mile roundtrip. And hopefully future versions of this stay-at-home promise will involve visitors coming to us, or even us leaving the house to have dinner nearby. We’re flexible to change the plan for exceptions. We still like the idea of waking up in our own home on Christmas Day, but if we have to be in Hawaii or someplace instead, then we will deal with it.
A ban on holiday travel is not so much a goodbye to tradition as it is about making the holidays work better for how we live now. I am a lucky girl to have family and friends who would even miss me on the holidays, but now’s the time to downsize my priorities from many people to three, and then build it up from there.
I will however, still let my mom make a stocking for me to open on Christmas Day. I’m not completely heartless.
photo by Fabrizio
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Kelly Gerow
Kelly Gerow lives and writes in Richmond. She probably does other stuff in Richmond, too.
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“smy smom countered-offered my traditions and requested that if we spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with one family, we then had to have Thanksgiving 2 or Christmas 2 with the other.
While I understood where she was coming from, this was not a practice that my husband and I really embraced. During the holidays we don’t get any extra time off than the day itself. Spending hours in a car and then having to do it again the next weekend with the other family was more hassle than honored tradition.”
YES EXACTLY THIS DING DING DING.
For the past years, my husband and I frantically would go to my parents on Christmas Eve (about an hour away, not a huge deal), do all the Christmas stuff the next morning, then at noon, we’d race to DC and *do it all again*. Same for Thanksgiving — Turkey Day 1, then Turkey Day 2.
After moving so that I’m now 3 hours away from my family, and 4 from his, we’ve had enough. We simply. cannot. do. it.
This year, we’re flip-flopping. It sucks. But it’s got to be done. We’ll Turkey with my family, and Christmas with his (blissfully in Staunton, much closer to us than DC now!).
I think after a while, it’s true — you *do* have to put a foot down and realize that your new family is your home base, and while it’s good to spend holidays “at home” — being “home for the holidays” doesn’t have to mean your childhood home. At least, that’s what I’m trying to remind myself as I gear up for explaining to smy smom soon that I don’t think our skipping Christmas day means we’re coming for New Years, when we both have to work the day before and day after! (My dad’s a teacher and this concept is a bit..foreign, even now!)
We put our foot down after traveling with an 11 month old one year. Now we stay home and have a laid back, leftover eating, re-gifted cookie sharing afternoon open house for a bunch of our friends and neighbors, most of whom are doing the same thing, as well as any others who don’t celebrate, etc. It’s OUR tradition now and we wouldn’t have it any other way. I think the important part is to have the tradition you want. If you all enjoy driving all over the place, hauling Santa everywhere you go, sleeping in your husband’s childhood bed, etc. then by all means do it! Drives me crazy when my friends whine, “I HAVE to go to my parents.” Actually, you’re 40 years old with a career, a mortgage and a couple of kids. You don’t HAVE to do anything except enjoy the holiday.