The Kids' Table

In case you were curious about how my holiday period went, I will sum it up thusly: festivity ACHIEVED.

Yes, one of the older people in attendance did take something of an unchecked headlong spill onto some rather unforgiving tile in the foyer, but we've got paramedics and firefighters in the family, so rest assured that everything was handled with care and enough professional haste to ensure she didn't linger there long enough to clash with the decor. If you're going to decorate a foyer, you're going to want it appreciated with all the feng shui balanced so as to maximally represent the effort applied and your understated good taste. I will say I am not without skill in the presentational flair department, but who can organize a space ordered, yet flexible enough to accommodate Injured Elderly Person? I'm a single, heterosexual American man. I have limits.

I come from Irish-Catholic* hard-breeding stock, cranking out progeny faster than God can make potatoes to feed them. So as to guard the good silver and cut down on the suicidal ideation, we rotate who hosts our big holiday 'do, which is always Christmas Eve. This year it was my turn.

There are a lot of us. I've been going to this Christmas Eve thing since as far back as I can remember, long before I was anywhere near old enough or psychologically irresponsible enough to volunteer to host the thing. My mother has 11 siblings, so once you start spinning out spouses and cadet branches, we're talking about a veritable Biblical multitude. It was smart of God to promise Abraham all those descendants by drawing out a metaphor about stars or grains of sand or whatever. If he'd laid eyes on an actual sweating throng of passive-aggression hopped upon nitrites and, well, hops, he may well have opted to let Isaac have it, just to be safe.

It's always the one day of the year we're able to get a sense of what kind of an enormous social enterprise we're all hooked in to and how it functions as a sort of Petri dish to build cultures of interpersonal spirochetes to then disseminate amongst the world at large. It's also a great opportunity to ruminate on the etymological literalness of a word like familiar as you ponder the faces of first-degree relations whose faces you recognize but whose names elude you.

Even though I volunteered to host, I did remember to spend the majority of the month running up to the event complaining bitterly about every aspect. The effort involved, the inconvenience of guests as a rule, the cost, the banal obligation of everything from the menu to the likely conversation, the delicate politics of faction and long-simmering blood feuds...

That last part is what really got to me. You can't be related to as many people as I am and not be faced with someone not talking to someone else. Followed by a trailing wake of bitterness as factors and seconds align themselves behind one of the equally aggrieved sides. And you try to stay above the fray, but one time--one time--you roll your eyes after the wrong comment and just like that, you're drafted. And when you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way.

It was that part of it--the kind of white-hot resentment we reserve exclusively for those with whom we are the longest and closest stuck--that nearly inspired me to cancel the whole shindy. But then I thought of my kids. Not in the sense that it would be necessarily good for them to be exposed to that kind of a poisonous environment, but that Christmas Eve being a big deal was a reliable lodestone, a pole-star I could count on throughout the tumult and shift of my own youth. They've had their share of tumult themselves over the last two years. Reliability is something I want for them. Plus like most parents, I'm convinced the only safe thing to do is make sure my kids have exactly the same childhood I did, regardless of any objective assessment of its quality, safety or side-effects.

The factional infighting seems so much worse every year. It wasn't like this when I was a kid. But being honest with myself, it probably was. These are, in the most literal of senses, the same people I grew up with. I most associate Christmas Eve with giddiness and the overpowering American fulfillment of getting, but I'm certain my memories are likely a fiction built on ignorance; the good kind of ignorance, the bliss-inducing strain borne out of the natural innocence of youth and a laser-like focus on the acquisition, uncovering and quality judgement of gifts to the exclusion of all else.

But it's Christmas. And my kids don't believe in Jesus anyway. What's another narrative?



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*drunk, but friendly drunk.