Family holidays always ignite nostalgia about experiences in our
family of origin. And just as reliably, they stir up all manner of
leftover family business. Even before a holiday gets off the ground,
bruised feelings and strained relations abound. Just the simple tact of
whose house the celebration is to take place in is a statement of family
alliances and conflicts, of who has "pull" in the family, who is most
central to the group. Which family members will travel the hundreds, if
not thousands, of miles in horrible weather at considerable expense to be
with the others?
When two or more relatives live in reasonable proximity, the
staging competition can be even more protracted and more finely grained:
Whose home will the main feast take place in? In whose home will gifts be
opened?
Thanksgiving, at least, is over and done with in a single
afternoon. Christmas, on the other hand, is typically a marathon of
events that can last for several days. Family members often maintain
their harmony during the rest of the year by carefully keeping their
distance from one another, but at Christmas, the enmeshment is complete.
Such convocations follow an inexorable rule: the longer relatives stay
together, the greater the chance the harmony will break down.
The emotional stakes are higher at Christmas as well. Thanksgiving
is more a national holiday in which the prevailing ritual is pretty much
identical from one house to the next: gobbling down turkey. With its more
family-particular traditions, Christmas runs deeper in the psyche, is
more tied to childhood memories.
It is the rare family in which siblings have not carried
long-simmering resentments into adulthood, such as a belief that another
sibling was really Mom's or Dad's favorite. As family members pull into
the driveway, they slide into old familiar roles as if they'd never left
home, gotten married and started their own dynasties.
In this atmosphere, nothing is natural; every act, every gesture
and word is emotionally charged. Arriving and saying hello, only to find
that your big sister or brother is—or isn't—there before you, can set
off feelings of being slighted.
As the family sits down to dinner, the stories that are told don't
just stand or fall on their own merit. They resonate with who has the
voice that's heard, and who spoke last time. Just whose version of that
Hawaii vacation 20 years ago dominates the conversation—once
again?
Issues that have spent the year (or the decade) in hibernation are
apt to surface: Who was the Cinderella? Who was always the good kid?
There's usually a hardworking sister who helps set up and clean up. This
"Cinderella" will be doing the dishes with Mom in the kitchen, becoming
ever more resentful, just like she used to, while her sister, the family
"Princess," is out snowmobiling—"and damn her, she's done that all her
life." Today, the sibling stew often is spiced with a bit of gender
twist. "The boys never had to do anything anyway."
The person who suffers most, though, may be the holiday
coordinator. Every family has one. Usually it's a woman
assigned—sometimes she volunteers—to take on the emotional and physical
responsibility for the holiday. She is, says Doherty, the holiday CEO,
with one outstanding difference: she doesn't actually command anyone
else.
But like any CEO, she wants to maximize profits. She wants the
holiday taking place on her watch to come off perfectly. She wants
everyone to be happy. She wants everyone to be merry all the time. She
wants no one to be irritable.
She is doomed to feel like a failure. What's more, she will be
completely burned out even before the holiday celebration begins. For
her, it becomes an endurance trial, and she is overwhelmed with
relief—and guilt—when everyone finally goes home.
It's her job, she believes, to actualize the cultural belief that
the family is one big harmonious group. As a result, she will spend a
great deal of holiday time trying to squash eruptions of irritability and
outright conflict. But the cast of holiday players is too large to
control. Her only option is to launch into overdrive and try to tightly
control the revelers. When, despite her best efforts to contain conflict,
Uncle Max and Uncle Eddie finally light into each other's politics, she
can be found on the back steps, sobbing into the frosty air.
Every family has its own culture of Christmas, its own set of
highly structured traditions. Most of them carry the force of
commandment. Even the subtlest difference in a ritual's practice, says
Doherty, can make anyone in attendance who was not born into the family,
not socialized into doing it that way, feel like it's not really
Christmas—and give rise to a morose subgroup of celebrants. When is the
tree decorated? When are the presents opened—on Christmas Eve or on
Christmas Day? And just how are they opened? Does everyone rip in at
once? Or are presents doled out one by one? And, oh yes, do we serve
turkey or ham? Or is it goose? Or Turducken?
Tags:
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