It's the beginning of everyone's favourite season here in Chez Onlymayday. This is, of course, a double entendre due to my love/hate relationship with the whole Christmas season.
As I tell my mother every year, there is no reason my brother and I should love Christmas, and yet, for some strange reason, both of us do. The biggest reason for hating the season revolves around what I long ago termed my father's Annual Christmas Tantrum. For some reason, December brought out the worst in my father, which meant it was survival of the fittest for the children of the household.
I have a feeling that some of my father's ire was due to his own love of the holiday. My father's family used to do Christmas with a vengeance. If you go to my grandfather's house now, there are little vestiges of Christmas everywhere, because that was the last holiday my Grandfather wasn't spending most of his time in the hospital, and, like I've said, no one's really done much with the house since then.
Grandpa went all out for Christmas, and my mother says even when I was young it was sort of a leftover version of the heyday. I understand at one time they had two Christmas trees in the house. I have all the Christmas ornaments, some of them I've never even seen before, and I could easily do three or four trees, especially if you wanted to get really artistic with them.
Anyway, Christmas for my father has certain traditions and ideas and beliefs. If you haven't decorated by Santa Lucia's Day (December 13th) there's no point in trying. Decoration before December 5th (Saint Nicholas Day), however, is strictly prohibited. There are certain foods that must be eaten on Christmas Eve, oyster soup, rye crisp, potato balogna (our recipie simply calls for a given ratio of potatoes to beef to pork and allspice- that is all), limpa rye (look that sucker up yourself) and, occasionally, lutefisk.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with lutefisk, outside of Nordic horror stories, but you may count yourselves lucky if you never personally encounter it. You may have heard the joke, We tried lutefisk and the possums went away, but now we've got a family of Norwegians under the house! Garrison Keillor, of Lake Wobegon fame, says that just eating a little lutefisk is the same as just throwing up a little; a little is still too much. I will pit lutefisk against Limburger cheese and spoiled milk for rankness. Yes, I have not only smelled it, but I have tasted it. Eaten is taking the action too far. I don't like fish to begin with, but that slimy nasty stuff takes things too far. My father boldly defends the cruelest thing man has done to a codfish (yes, even comparison to Captain Hook did not injure the beast's reputation so much), yet I notice that he doesn't make it every year and he rarely eats much of it. That prize was held by my grandfather, who thought it was wonderful stuff. Still, he lived through the depression so he must have had something of a cast iron stomach in the first place.
Anyway, back to the Annual Holiday Tantrum. Christmas Day was another event entirely. I understand that for most people, Christmas dinner tends to be Thanksgiving Dinner Mach II (or would Thanksgiving Dinner Electric Boogaloo be more appropriate?). This was never the case with my family- turkey was strictly outlawed. Sometimes a bird was featured; we've had goose and duck and I think once one of my uncles raised/hunted pheasants, but cows and pigs also made their appearances in the form of roasts.
Still, my memories are only, I have been told, a shadow of what they were before my father finished college. This is sort of the natural course of holiday traditions. The Boy's mother is busy being heartbroken over the end of the holidays as she knew them, and it's because things have moved down to another generation who have other families to be involved in and don't have the time to continue with the old. There's really no such thing as tradition, when I think about it. A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman on TV aren't a tradition, really. They're not running at the same time every year with the original commercials. I think a few of them have even changed networks a couple times. It's sort of the same, but not really.
Live Christmas trees are sold in grocery store (*cough*Wal-Mart*cough*) parking lots these days, it's very hard to find independant tree farms with town lots. Sure, you can go out to the tree farm and cut your own, but I mean like when Ralphie's family goes in A Christmas Story. It always seems like you're pretty much on your own in the grocery store. When I was a kid, we'd go to several places in town each year, tree farms that would bring in trees to empty fields down on the south side of town. We'd invariably buy from the same place, but we'd go look at a lot of them first, because there were a lot of places.
Christmas is a different holiday from when I was a kid, and it seems that it's changing a lot more just recently.
I have a feeling that this happened to my father and as his expectations of the holiday kept swirling down the toilet bowl of the past (well, there's a metaphor for you) his ability to deal with being robbed of his holiday cheer disintegrated into making certain no one else had any either.
I suppose if you peel away all the stuff my brother and I tend to remember, they weren't bad. But we spent a lot of Decembers in tears for one reason or another. In a lot of ways, I'd say that Christmas made my father bi-polar. I think my brother and I still have the hope that we can distill the perfect Christmas out of the bits and pieces we remember being good, and then improve on it.
Sadly, the other reason this is "our favorite time of year" is that I haven't been able to do that. I want my own Christmas tree. I don't want to have to pack up and drive all over the country. I want to do Christmas my way and screw everyone else.
Nice and festive, eh? I realise it's more the spirit of selfishness, but every Christmas I can remember vowing that as soon as I had half a chance, I'd do Christmas my way and I'd show 'em.
And I haven't had that chance yet. Granted, I have years, but the way things are going, especially last year, I feel like having my very own Annual Christmas Tantrum.
You know, carry on the tradition.