Merry Christmas in July:P

[captainsblog]

Hard to believe I'm writing about a holiday many moons away on a day when I am sweating inside an air conditioned office while doing nothing in particular, but here we are.  The Ghost of Christmas Past came a'janglin yesterday, and it's still stinking up the joint to some extent.

While there is one particular Christmas at the center of this story, it is not the only holiday of its kind which resonates.  This, in its entirety, is all I wrote on Christmas Day of 2016 about the events that came back to haunt yesterday:

"Wanted: 2017 Calendar. Missing Two Days."
 
That's my Christmas entry in the legendary (it turns out urban-legendary) six-word-story contest that Ernest Hemingway won with "For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn."  It has just as much emotion and sadness pent up in those fourteen syllables from the past fourteen or so hours and a period like it a month ago.

The days to get it down to 363 are the last Thursday in November and the 24th of December- each the culmination of modern-day morphs of traditional harvest and solstice festivals, all co-opted by retail and media into virtual orgies of conspicuous consumption.

For anyone, it's got to be difficult.  For those of us- as did both of us- who came from families with emotional issues surrounding these holidays, it's far worse.  We've passed it on to our daughter as certainly as she got my blue eyes and Mom's artistic skills; and it's magnified (as in setting-ants-on-fire magnifying) by her boyfriend coming from his own two semi-families who mess with his head as well as Emily's around these times.

At Thanksgiving, they brought it in with them.   You may have read the whys and wherefores of it elsewhere; they're not necessary to you understanding the pain everyone felt.  Eleanor and I took major steps over the ensuing month to help Emily deal with what she was feeling and needed to do. We are continuing those efforts. By the time they left last month, all was well.

Until it wasn't- and another round of Holiday Emotional Roulette began last night. We all said, did or didn't do things that are now regretted.  Again, you may see greater specifics, but you don't need to. By mid-morning, kinder words had been exchanged, Eleanor and I recommitted to helping Emily understand and respond to what has been going on, and for now, all is calm, all is relatively bright.

And there is one thing all four of us have absolutely agreed on: these days have got to go.

I thought we had this.  By eliminating the demands of the days- no food-coma dinners, no decorations, no deals (big) being made- could we get through these pages of the calendar without driving each other crazy?

Answer: no.  So here's the new plan- to simply make the question go away.

Beginning next year, Eleanor and I will avail ourselves of a simple, if local, solution to the triggers and traumas of Turkey Day: it's called Canada.  They have their harvest festival over a month earlier on our Murder of Indigenous Peoples Day weekend. Their last Thursday in November is, well, the last Thursday in November, eh?  One border crossing, a nice dinner out for the two of us- of something other than an overstuffed poultry with all the trimmings- and then a movie or show of some sort.  The kids can do their own things and, if they need to escape the other rents' holiday issues, our home will be here and quiet for them to retreat to.

Christmas Eve?  Out to a Chinese restaurant and a cinema.  Just like Jews will have been doing for over 4700 years;)

The other 363 days of the year, we will be here, and here for them.  But we can't continue these family traditions just because Hallmark and Wal-Mart are pushing us to.

Enjoy your own celebrations, however and however big you wish them.  Please be understanding of our need to be a little different, though. 

For the most part, we've stuck to those principles, even without actually leaving the country. The kids have lived away from us for the past two-plus years and have not visited around those occasions, but the memories of holidays past continue to reverb.  Eleanor had ended her blog shortly before the Christmas events, but here is how she described the Thanksgiving which led up to it:

The young folks arrived about three on Thursday.  I went out to greet them (Ray was napping-I was not so lucky).  They were walking quickly around the car, in a bizarre version of musical chairs, arguing.  Loudly.  Emily begged me to give them some time; I walked back inside.  Ray was waking up, and I told him what was going on.

I am going to synopsize here.

Emily needs better help than she's getting with her anxiety, as well as significant help with depression.

Cameron needs help with anger management.

Emily needs a good new job.

They need another car, quite possibly before she can get a new job.

I did a lot of talking and counseling that night.  Cameron clearly loves her, and she loves him, but they can't keep on as they are.

I got on the Blue Cross website Friday morning and looked for psychiatrists in her geographic area.  Came up empty. Today I found one in Canandaigua, about twenty minutes away.  We still need to work on the transportation issue, etc..

I didn't remember any of that, but I do remember the events of Christmas Eve 2016, in which a stop at our home turned into a knockdown-dragout fight between mother and daughter that ended with Eleanor telling the kids to get out of the house.  By the next morning, tempers had cooled, everybody had seemingly made up, and over the next year, some of  the things Eleanor wrote about in her Thanksgiving post did come to pass: Emily did get a much better job, and entirely on her own; and after I got my current Smart car, I gave them my then-hybrid to replace the much older one I'd given them after their 2013 car accident- first just letting them use it, then giving it to her outright when she got that better job so she could insure it herself.

It had seemed that things between Emily and Eleanor were on a good course; they speak and text far more often than I do with the kid, and have a lot more in common with artistic and gardening endeavours.  And the initial topics of our communications yesterday led to no problems at all until an offhand remark at the end between them took it all off the rails.

----

As if we don't have enough E's here, Cameron's stepmother is also named Eleanor- but she goes by "El." Somehow in the course of signing off, Eleanor mentioned to Emily that she occasionally sees El at the store and either El doesn't recognize her or is pretending not to.  Emily responded that El does recognize her, but doesn't acknowledge it when they're in the same place because the last thing El heard from Emily about Eleanor is about the night when she "threw her out of the house."

Wow.  Does El even know the difference between a fight-ending "get out" and a "take your shit and don't ever come back" ultimatum?  Because the latter is what Cameron got from his stepfather, several years before this Christmas 2016 incident, which led to Cameron moving in, not with El and his dad, but with us.  Emily doesn't know if El understands, and doesn't feel any particular obligation to clarify things with her. 

Making the tempest in the teapot even worse is how little the actual interaction really means. Eleanor told me she maybe sees El in the store a couple of times a year, usually all focused on her younger kids who are with her. Even Emily hasn't had much interaction with El in the past two years.  But as I told the kid when we revisited the whole thing earlier, there will come a time when we are all going to be together socially- whether it's a wedding, a christening or a funeral (and given current conditions, the latter might be the most likely of the three).  I hate having these unresolved issues waiting for, what else?, another socially pressured occasion for everybody to be forced into interactions with each other.

I think we've all decided to just give this time for more healing to occur.  It helps knowing that there won't be future Thanksgiving or Christmas Big Events for things to get out of hand again. (And these certainly aren't limited to our immediate family- I have a whole catalog of knockdown-dragouts among various factions of my own fam going back to childhood.)

Still, it hasn't been fun to deal with.

Comments

[glenmarshall]

Holidays are semi-traumatic for me.

There once were intergenerational struggles, compounded by alcohol. After I moved out of state and became a son-in-law, things were better emotionally but holidays became more logistically complex. Add some siblings-in-law, kids, then grandkids, and it was like juggling turkeys.

Then some people died and some grew up. It could/should be simpler. But we joined forces with BFFs for holiday celebrations, making the logistics more "interesting".

I look forward to moving to an adult life care community, where the staff does the work and we eat the bird. But I suspect we will be invited to my son's GF's family's holidays.

Canada is an option. Not Toronto, where we have good friends, but maybe Halifax.