Over the summer, I wrote about my family’s celebration of Christmas in July. I wrote that one of the disadvantages of being a family of three is that something that seems really great when you have a large group involved can seem really strange when you only have three people. For example, matching t-shirts are a staple at family vacations and reunions. T-shirts that say ‘Keep the change ya filthy animal’ worn by a group of three seem ridiculous. Similarly, some holiday traditions just aren’t the same with a small group.
In recent years, we have made Christmas plans as a family of three. When I was younger, the holidays were spent with grandparents on both sides of the family, in Niagara Falls and Sarnia. The tradition of spending Christmas in Sarnia remained until my grandfather died, the last of my grandparents. Cities that had once been relevant to the family ceased to be. Sarnia is now a place of memories, factories, and a surprisingly good chain of cafes. We no longer have a place where we need to be, which can be great because it means we no longer need to driver through blizzards to make it to a Christmas dinner on time, and I no longer need to sleep on the hardwood floor in a Minnie Mouse sleeping bag when all the beds are taken up. But for the most part, I miss those family dinners, even if they invovled a lot of leftovers and bad jokes by the third days. The three of us celebrated Christmas alone for the first time last year, and we had to rethink how we do things.
Celebrating Christmas as a family of three can be difficult. It’s not that we don’t like each other. We are lucky that we function very well as a family of three. We appreciate each other’s humour and share interests that guarantee we are never without something to talk about. We’re adventurous, and yet we are aware of our limitations. (We rode donkeys up a cliff once, and acknowledged a shared fear of heights and donkeys afterwards.) The problem is that some of the ceremony that surrounds family holiday celebrations benefits from the presence of a larger group. Christmas feasts, unless scaled down to the appropriate size, mean we’ll be eating leftover mashed potatoes for the next six weeks. Secret Santa becomes a little unnecessary. And though we make a fine vocal trio, we would look more like robbers than carollers if we started singing door to door. Some of the traditions that were part of our larger family celebrations don’t translate as well to Christmas with just the immediate family. We don’t want to do away with tradition all together though, or else our Christmas festivities might amount to a celebration of televised basketball.
Over the past few years, we’ve had to consider the parts of the holiday that mean the most to us, so we that we aren’t simply going through the motions of traditions. A lot of the activities that came to be family traditions were put in place so it would be easier for a large family to do things as a group. My parents and I have always been involved in each other’s lives, so we don’t need to use big meals or gift exchanges as a chance to connect. Though the line “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” rings true for many, being home is less exciting when we all share the same permanent address. We have always enjoyed family holidays — minus the donkey up a cliff incident — so we have decided to use the Christmas break to travel. What matters most to us is being together, so we have decided to be together in some place more exciting than our own living room. Last year, on our first official holiday as a family of three, we went to Disney World. We spent Christmas Eve in Magic Kingdom, and ended our vacation watching fireworks at Epcot.
This year, we still got to spent time around the fire watching The Sound of Music, one of my favourite traditions from Christmas in Sarnia. We got together with family before the break, and will see some good friends after. Now it’s time for us to continue with our new family tradition of travelling over the break. Maybe our decision to spend Christmas in Las Vegas is unconventional, but we’ll never know what can become a tradition until we try something out. I still think we should have tried out the tradition of ‘Merry Christmas ya filthy animal’ shirts, but we can always wearing them next year.
Song of the Day: Christmas Canon Rock by Trans-Siberian Orchestra
