Holidays are too much work!

“Oh my gosh!   Janine run and get a small dish and fill it with hot water and laundry detergent!  Hurry!” my Grandmother anxiously said to my Mother.   My Grandmother was holding up a portion of the tablecloth and dabbing it with her napkin that she had just dipped into her glass of ice water.   Everyone was suddenly silent, staring at my Grandmother and the guilty party, me.  You see I had dropped some gravy on the tablecloth.  But this wasn’t just any tablecloth.  This is one my Grandmother had patiently and lovingly cross stitched for over a year.   My Mother arrived back with the small bowl filled with some magic stain remover.  My Grandmother placed it under the spot on the tablecloth and still showing some anxiety she sat down.  We all breathed a sigh of relief and I hoped that this secret formula could remove the stain from the beautiful tablecloth.  I kept looking anxiously in the direction of the stain throughout the meal to see if it was actually disappearing.

My Grandmother would spend weeks preparing for the holidays.  I can remember hearing her and my Mother discussing what food they would serve, where they would buy it and how they would prepare it.   My grandmother would clean the house and spend hours setting the table for the holiday meal.  The table was set with all her best china and crystal.  There were candles on the table that we would light during the meal.   All the silver was polished and gleaming.  All the large platters and serving dishes would be taken down from the top shelves where they had spent the last year.   It was a feast!

All this preparation and anticipation created great excitement on the part of the family.  We understood these were special occasions.  We would all don our Sunday best clothes, behavior and manners.  We had great respect for my Grandmother and all the work and love she put into planning and preparing for the holidays.    At Christmas time she would spend hours cutting little candies up into pieces which she would use to create holly and other Christmas symbols to place on top of the small tea cookies she had baked.  I can see her now in her kitchen bent over the counter concentrating on those cookies.  I couldn’t understand how she could spend so much time on something that someone was just going to eat in a few days but that didn’t matter to her.  It really was a labor of love and it was part of what she believed defined her as a good wife and mother. Who am I to judge that?

It seems each holiday I reminisce about the past holidays and revisit memories of my Grandmother and her house that smelled of gingerbread and evergreens.   Oh it wasn’t all good times but I find the happy memories come to mind much more often than the unhappy ones. 

 My Grandmother has been gone for quite some time now.  As I reminisce about her I wonder what my children will reminisce about in the years to come. I have not had the time or energy or maybe even desire to do what my Grandmother did to make the holidays special.  For a while I let that keep me from doing anything.  I was overwhelmed by the thought that I would have to do all that stuff and I knew I couldn’t.  Still I instinctively knew that I needed to do something to celebrate the holidays and make them special.  When my children were very young, as a single parent, I was totally exhausted with just doing the regular daily stuff of living.  Somehow I forced myself to engage in certain holiday activities that we repeated each year.  Sometimes it was as simple as attending an annual Christmas tree lighting.  It was a way of saying the holiday was special but more importantly it was a way to take time out of a hectic schedule to “tell” my children they were  special and important.  I came to realize, later, that these annual traditions created shared memories and activities that forged a bond between us – helped to shape us into a family. 

Even now I find I want to give up on some of our traditions as they are too much work or take too much time.  Life continues to be ever busy and filled with activities that take up so much time.  I keep thinking we will go out to eat for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner or I won’t decorate the house or tree this year or I’ll just give money as Christmas gifts.   But then I muster the energy and desire and I remember, as we are all standing around the kitchen as I cook and sitting around the beautifully decorated table that these activities bring us together physically and emotionally.  As we eat we reminisce about past holidays and meals and the good times we had back then.   We also tend to remember and focus on the good rather than the bad – maybe holiday traditions help us do that.

 My children are now young adults and they understand the work and effort all of this takes.  But if I hadn’t taken the time or made the effort when they were too young or too rebellious  to appreciate it or understand the work and sacrifice it takes to “have” a holiday I wouldn’t be reaping the benefits now.   As it was with my Grandmother, this is a labor of love – sometimes appreciated and sometimes not – but always a gift of love to my family.  Perhaps that is the best tradition of all that I can pass onto my children – that they are special and loved and we are a family. The holiday traditions we create are a wonderful way to say that.

Q:  What are your holiday traditions? What message do they convey to your loved ones?