For most of life, Christmas was about piling into the car and driving up to Charlotte - first to see my mom's side of the family then, because also from Charlotte, my father's. This holiday tradition hardly skipped a beat after my parents divorced, though afterward the spanking with a belt frequency went to zero. I rather appreciated that alteration in my lifestyle after the age of four. One remembers beatings long after they stop, I can vouch for that.
So, alone of my immediate family, I rather liked my dad better after the divorce. Mom and older brother certainly did not. I saw him in controlled doses, under circumstance he knew could be altered instantly and permanently if he ever acted out. He only lost his cool once and the only victim of that outburst was a broken jar of mayonnaise.
But let's talk of the happier things: My mom's family is very Presbyterian, very proper, very serious. Things are done, just so. People say and do and are things, just so. The good news is the Christmas feast was predictably wholesome, tasty and had the same menu every year - and no one minded at all. The was turkey and ham. There was sweet potato casserole. There were always green beans and red potatoes cooked with a slab of bacon fat. Uncle Bob always said the blessing and it was neither brief nor vainglorious. I think 30-40 seconds is about par. Presents were passed out, it always seemed to take a long time. Sweaters figured prominently I learned to like sweaters as a child. I own one now and it's old. I suppose I never got into the habit of buying my own sweaters. Maybe I will get one for Christmas this year.
Ah, the changes. My dad is dead a bit of 17 years. He never met Mrs K. He never met his grandkids, not mine or the ones my older brother eventually had. And speaking of grand-people, all of mine are gone, the last in 2011 - my mother's mother, at age 100 years. So, we don't drive to Grandmother's any more (and it was always, ALWAYS Grandmother. Never Grandma, and absolutely never-ever Granny); actually, that had become my Aunt Donna's house for the last 15-ish years of her life.
And that's a rather big change. My aunt had retired to take care of my grandmother. And that retirement was a second career, caring for exactly one patient. Oh, and hosting the various holiday gatherings. So, once Grandmother passed away, so did the Christmas gatherings. It was as if that side of the family died.
The Kendrick clan still gathers. Since there are so many brothers, less my father, and they are all grandfathers now, there's so many kids. The Kendricks are, well, a strange mix of very churchy and ribald. They run the ideological range from, ahem, Republican to Tea Party to Theocracy Would Be Nice to Who Cares The Rapture's Nigh. Then there's us, haha.
But they're family. And they still have gatherings. The food isn't so just-so as my mom's family insists upon... but the Christmas feasts take place, pizza and spaghetti and buffalo wings and all. People even remembered to bring salad and vegetable sides and that most Southern of veggies - cole slaw - for the balanced diet thing you read about on the Internets.
And in a nutshell, that's what's different now. I grew up preferring my mother's family gatherings, despite the disdainful glares from elder relatives for Practicing Christmas While Child. I liked it because better food, classier, a sense of tradition and taking the time to take care and pride in the preparation and the experience. In other words, the holiday was taken seriously, even if we kids had to sneak outside to have any fun at all. And we'd still get disapproving glares through the windows, because People Might See Us Goofing Around.
I suppose I find myself liking my father's family gatherings now. One, because they're serious about keeping the family connection going, not the trappings and routines.
And two, because they're the only game in town now. For all intents and purposes, my mother's family Christmas gatherings died with Grandmother.
Yet I must amend all of the above. There is a Christmas tradition I prefer most of all, though I once thought it a chore. I hate traveling for the holidays.
Yet every other year for as long as we've known each other, MKK and I go to her family's gathering. It used to be Michigan, then Oklahoma and now Texas. I didn't like going so much at first. I couldn't even say way at first, but now I can.
I didn't like seeing a family gathering that worked. I had grown up in dual contexts where either all conversations had subtext (my mom's family) or no meaningful text at all (my dad's).
Yet here were smart, interesting, engaged people who loved each other, doing Christmas like it was supposed to be done.
It made me.... it made me feel small, ashamed, even more bitter and marginal for such a long time. Like seeing sunlight for the first time in ages, or ever. Or hearing Mozart after all the music you ever knew was nursery rhymes. Or tasting a fresh pear after canned fruit cocktail in syrup.
It took a long time to grow accustomed to being part of a family. To truly feeling a part of something bigger and better than myself.
And I know I always had these things - many families, many intersecting and overlap. Some are a sojourn for a few years, those families if you will of work and fellowship that stay close and dear then run their course. I regret more than a few of those endings, same as I do the unnecessary demise of one half of my natural family's even bothering to meet up for Christmas.
It does not mean I don't love them, any of them, even those I will never see again. What they said still matters. What I imagine they say and feel and do, wherever they are this Christmas Eve, yet matters to me greatly.
If it didn't, I wouldn't miss the fellowship that once was, even as I remember it fondly.
Merry Christmas and Auld Lang Syne, every one.