Okay. The much awaited Christmas report.
This year was the best year for Husband and I in terms of Christmas. In the beginning, our Christmasses involved flying home from Halifax, then jamming in five or six major social engagements over just a few days, which is a bitch under the best of circumstances, but totally unmanageable when you add in Husband’s inflexible need to meet up with Andy and Esan for nightly drinking in the city. Our families live in the valley. So we spent our holidays driving frantically from one place to another, hung over, and, on one notable occasion, both down with a feverish flu. And of course we were usually house guests somewhere, actually at Esan’s, which is very gracious and kind of him, but it’s never easy being a guest in someone else’s home. You know. You’re always worried about being tidy enough, cheerful enough, non-imposing enough, and this is exhausting (but let it be said, Esan is an excellent host who never once complained about how we totally took over the entire living area of his apartment. If, for any reason, he finds himself in need of crash space, our home is always open to him.).
So. Husband is what I would call slow to warm to others, and those early years of visiting my family were not well tolerated by him. I’m sure he was counting the minutes it took away from the partying he wanted to be doing, and I was similarly counting the time we’d have to waste with his parents, whom I admit here and before god that I actively dislike. We were tired from flying, stressed about multiple commitments, irritated by each other’s families, and pressured by the encroaching return flight time. It sucked.
Add to this that Christmas was just about the only time I got to see my family while I lived in Halifax. I missed them terribly and hated being out of the family unit. It was really important to me that I spend time with them, and equally important to Husband (then Boyfriend, and finally Fiance) to avoid them. Just imagine what that did to our relationship! Oh the delightful conversations we had on that little topic! Anyway, the thing is, and I know this is totally mundane and you’ll roll your eyes at me for being such a softy, but I had a really hard time with my parents’ divorce. Christmas became the time of year that the divorce was most obvious, because, hello, I spent the weeks leading up to is nervously attending to the formulation of plans for how my brother (who is ten years younger than me) would be shared between our parents. I always just went where he did, which seemed the right thing to do, but it tied me into the delicate negotiations. Who got Christmas dinner? Morning? Boxing day? Ugh.
And then the days themselves: always watching the clock, when do we have to leave, where would we rather be, guilt about having a preference. And for me, the emptyness of having Christmas be just the three of us, no longer a foursome. It wasn’t the same. Even though my parents were a bad match, and the divorce was, in my opinion, a necessary ingredient in my dad’s decision to quit drinking (three and a half years dry this winter- thank god!). I know divorce is super common and since I was about twenty when it happened, I should have been able to handle it with aplomb. But I didn’t, and maybe this is the secret of divorce: it’s not a little thing. It’s hard on everyone, and maybe shouldn’t be thought of as something one gets over quickly.
Anyway, Christmas became the time when I tried to recapture the family feeling in the absence of my family as I grew up knowing it. I clung pretty hard to the family traditions. When my mom changed up the order of Christmas morning (breakfast before presents instead of vice versa), I was thoroughly put out. How dare she? Well, really, who cares? Someone who’s trying to make things the way they used to and can never be again, that’s who. And this is the scene Husband came into: me, missing my family and fighting to keep the old ways, but in only a few days and with the added necessity of visiting his parents.
So looking back on it, I think it was probably inevitable that we’d not have a good time over the holidays. Moving home to Vancouver really helped, of course, because we can visit my family whenever we (or I, since Husband isn’t really into visiting them) want. The time pressure is off. Also, we no longer see Husband’s parents, which is good for lots of perfectly valid reasons that have nothing to do with Christmas, but also has the side effect of taking some pressure off the holidays. One less major visit to make, you know? And, I’ve gotten better about the new shape of my family. My brother is older now, graduating high school this year. I feel less of a need to protect him. I am finally getting along with my mom’s boyfriend (he’s a good guy, but almost unbelievably slow to warm, and we just never got friendly until about the time I got married, which was several years after they got together). My dad is doing well, much more settled than he was in the past. So there’s less emotional urgency to the holidays.
This year, Husband and I had a very good time at every place we went. We reserved part of Christmas eve just for us, and shared a bottle of champagne while watching The Grinch (cartoon, not Jim Carrey), and exchanged our presents that night. Earlier that day we had Husband’s sister and her family for dinner, which was very nice. Christmas morning was at my dad’s, where we had a great visit before popping briefly over to my sort-of grandparents (it’s a long story, but they’re my dad’s first ex-wife’s parents). After that, we spent the day loafing and reading and chatting before hosting a big family dinner at dad’s. Boxing day is reserved for my mom, and we spent the day at her apartment in the city, talking, eating, playing bingo with my step-siblings (who are, I believe, nine and thirteen), and reading. It was, all in all, a relaxed pace and a positive experience at each place.
Having that part of Christmas eve at home was crucial. For the first time, I’m making my own Christmas traditions that do not rely on a memory of the past, rather than working frantically to recreate an unrecreatable past. It felt great to place that anchor. I think we’ll keep doing that.
So, I guess that’s all I have to say about the holidays. My main feeling, now that it is done, is relief. Everything went well. Husband and I had some great times together. I saw everyone I wanted to (well, mostly - I have some dear friends who live too far away to visit), and was able to unpack a lot of my emotional baggage. This holiday was more real, more rooted in the present, than any I’ve had since my parents split. What a wonderful experience!