Now, let's get real. What is it that we most associate with Holidays?......That's it, FAMILY GATHERINGS! You now those, the collections of people that we may or may not try to avoid all year long only to dress up in our very best clothes to spend a blissful day with! Yes, those people! I once had a friend whose uncle described their extended family gathering as "a large collection of people who require massive amounts of alcohol, street drugs and medication to function with civility on three days a year without involving the police or firearms." While not all families are like that, the reality is that many are somewhere on THAT end of the spectrum.
Try as they may, families, especially those laced with addiction, are not famous for working with each other in large numbers for significant periods of time (like double-digit numbers of minutes!). Why we use the excuse of holidays for these episodes of torture, I'm not quite sure. the truth is in the Bumper Sticker:
There's NOTHING Holy about Holidays!
However, I do think there is a message in the perceived absurdity. It's for the children. If we didn't have these seemingly petty rituals and things with which to occupy the adults, the kids would have to sit around and watch the grown ups figure out how to interact with each other. Can you imagine if nothing happened after Christmas or Easter Dinner but the conversations between Grandma, Aunt Mimi, and Aunt Lulu? Or, what if the whole afternoon entertainment was left to those three, Uncle Bob, Gramps, and Cousin Charlie? You know who these people are. Can you imagine the fiasco, brawls, arguments or boredom that would ensue if those people or whomever they represent in your world were all that held the family's attention at family gatherings? What if that was all we had to look forward to?
Let's look at it this way: at least Easter dinner/lunch has the deadline of the egg hunt or the candy fest or the first kid to puke from the candy. At Christmas, either we have to get home before the elf gets stuck in the chimney or nobody slept on the Eve and the little ones are so cranky they WANT us to go home! yo can finish the list of so-called holi-days from there.
If we didn't have the innocence of children to keep us all from becoming familiocidal, holidays might be limited to well-policed public gatherings for mandatory rituals to avoid eternal damnation! Otherwise, it could just be too dangerous to get together.
The good news about healing and recovery is that my family is learning to tell each other that we've enjoyed about as much as we can stand of ourselves and that's OK. We love to be together and we love to plan the next gathering, in part, because it means that we're all going to our own castles where we make our own rules and have our own say-so. We don't have to wait until somebody leaves to talk about them because we have better things to do -- we talk about them to their face and enjoy the laugh. If we're mad about something, we save that for after the gathering and really have it out one-on-one until the problem is solved as much as loved ones can solve problems. Then, unless it will throw the Earth off its axis, we let it go (well, most of the time). The purpose of gatherings is to enjoy each other, cook together, eat, entertain the children, do the silly rituals we all love and laugh. Isn't that far more holy? Then, again, we don't do that only on Hallmark days. We do it whenever we want and for whatever reason we want. We may change the menu for Holidays, based on what the commercials say, and the recreation may change, but our gatherings .....they are all about the same. I like it that way. Come to think of it, the Bumper Sticker is right...
There's NOTHING Holy about Holidays!!
1 comment:
AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Post a Comment