My husband’s family is currently engaged in a frantic search for Christmas Past. In the process of digitizing 40-some volumes of childhood photos, they discovered that there are no Christmas photos for several years. Now e-mails and phone calls are flying among four states: Did the digitizing service lose them? Were the photos never filed in the meticulously organized albums, or somehow never even developed? Did the family simply not travel to see distant relatives during those lost years?
This last question would seem to be the easiest to answer, but it’s not. My husband spent an hour or so on the Internet, researching the dates and locations of academic conferences that might have interfered with holiday travel plans for his parents, both professors. He’s on to something, but the mystery is still unsolved.
The photos, it seems, have become the memories. No photos, no memories.
Well, that’s one lesson, a cynical one, to take away from this. Here’s another one: This family’s big, tradition-bound holiday celebration has not varied in the least — except for the successive addition of children and grandchildren — for well over three decades. The tree rises in the same corner of the front room.
Local guests ring the doorbell around 5 p.m. The schnitzel and shrimp cocktail and kugel start flowing out of the kitchen at 6. The house fills up with family and somebody calls for shots of slivovice around 9. Every year.
As each cousin and second cousin walks in the door, they all pick up right where they left off. The younger generations may be a little taller, the older generations a little stouter, but it’s the same party, just 365 days later.
So it’s possible my husband missed a few moments of that ongoing party during his childhood. But, thanks to the strength of their traditions, it really was just a few moments in a family party that feels as if it could last forever.
We asked you for your family traditions and share a few of them on page 5. It’s clear from reading all of them that it’s the simplest things that make the happiest memories and the strongest traditions — for our children, and for us.
Happy holidays.
