Christmas is one of my favorite times of year. Despite coming from a short line of godless folk, my family always made the most of the holiday season with the month of December making up a sizeable portion of my core childhood memories. The smell of our log furnace when the weather turned cold. Pulling an old wooden sled out into our pasture to cut a cedar tree on a snowy day. Stringing popcorn strands while baking pfeffernüsse (tiny spice cookies) and mohnkuchen* (a rolled sweet bread with a poppy seed swirl). You know, real Little House on the Prairie-type-shit.
So, of course, why wouldn’t I try each and every year to recapture some of that childhood magic for my adult Christmases? And maybe your mileage may vary, but most experienced parents would probably pat me on my head like a sweet December child for having any kind of hope that my kids would remotely be interested in listening to Bing Crosby and watching my wife and I ooh and aww as we take out our old Christmas ornaments from that one box in the basement. Yes, they have their own ornaments (hand-sculpted from polymer clay each year as a replica of their favorite stuffy/cartoon character/Bigmouth hormone monster–they are growing up fast), the house is full of sweets, and there is an advent calendar with more sweets, but deep down, we all know the hard truth. Christmas is really just kind of a parent thing.
The tree is beautiful when it’s finally decorated, but rather than evoking any feelings of ineffable nostalgia, for the kids it is just another task, another reminder of last year and how cold the tree farm was, and how much they’d rather be watching TV instead of listening to another of dad’s lectures about how, despite all auditory evidence to the contrary, at one time, Maurice Chevalier was basically as popular as Taylor Swift.
XKCD has a good strip on this (as it does for most things):
Reading that, I realized I was just on some boomer-type-shit with all this holiday cheer stuff. Try as one might, it’s not easy to instill your EXACT nostalgia into a new generation–and I’m not sure there’s a big upside beyond the obvious selfish one to continue to try each year anyway. Nostalgia is personal, unique to each individual once you move past broad strokes, and ultimately out of our control as parents. My son and daughter will likely have fonder memories of hiding out from a large family gathering together at the coffee table with their presents than my carefully curated Christmas MOURNING playlist.
Of course, my own rosy memories of holidays past may only be rose-tinted. Surely my sister and I too would complain about having to walk out in the pasture to cut down a scraggly-ass cedar tree in a fucking snowstorm (actually, I doubt it, that shit was magical!) But holidays are full of stress, and even the best of times comes with a lot of frantic rushing around and drawn out family photos where I probably just wanted to get back to my Tarzan book while holding a smile for a 10th picture.
So what now? Cancel Christmas? Hell no, my wife and I are far too invested–there’s no turning back now. I think the best anyone can do is to keep living the traditions they enjoy, making new ones in the hopes that SOMETHING will catch on for the kids, and slowly relaxing the forced participation in the ones the kids just have no interest in (or at the very least keep the guilt trips about not wanting to participate in tree decoration to a minimum). If we can just make it through the teen years with an overall more joyful than not December, we all might just come out the other side with yet another generation ready to foist their traditions, unwanted, on the next.
*You want to talk about tradition? In researching this post, I was horrified to discover the sweet bread with a swirl of poppyseed in the middle that my lovely German grandmother always used to make is actually “mohnstrudel” and “mohnkuchen” is instead the name for a non-swirled poppyseed CAKE (sometimes on a shortening bread crust). What’s next, am I going to find out that Bing Crosby, the man, is not the perfect figurehead for holiday cheer?
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