Making New Holiday Traditions When the Old Ones Break

My youngest son called yesterday with an apology. “I’m sorry, Mom, but do you mind if I don’t spend Christmas with you?”

He had a valid reason: his girlfriend’s parents are coming to their apartment for Christmas, and she asked him to stay and share the holiday.

“No. I don’t mind at all,” I said. “Of course you should stay.” Then we hung up and I cried.

Why was I so sad? It was stupid. I know I should be ecstatic—and let’s be clear, I am—that my children are fully fledged, with partners, jobs, apartments, and busy lives. But like most of us, holidays are weighed down with an absurd amount of emotional baggage for me. I am a child of divorced parents. My childhood Christmases were fraught with tension. When I got divorced and was a single mom with two kids, then got remarried to a man with two kids of his own, I swore that our family Christmases would always be holidays of joy and abundance.

Our holidays have changed now that everyone is older and partnered. One or more kids have been missing from the Christmas table in past years. Sometimes that’s easier. Like all families, ours is full of Personalities with a capital “P.” There have been rifts, slights, and silences. But this is the first time I’m celebrating Christmas without a single child on the holiday itself, and it feels wrong.

To be fair, it’s partly our fault. For the first time in 30 years of marriage, my husband and I are not hosting Christmas. We are, instead, going to New York to my niece’s place because her parents, my brother and his wife, will be visiting from England. When we first hatched this plan, it was partly because two kids had already announced they would be on the West Coast for the holiday, visiting their in-laws.

So when we got the invitation from my niece, my husband looked at me and said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be guests, just this once? No buying a stupidly expensive roast and tree this year!” he added gleefully.

“No beds to change or sheets to wash. I’m not even putting up the lights,” I declared. “And forget wreaths.”

“Yup. Mr. and Mrs. Scrooge, that’s us,” my husband said.

Except then our youngest daughter, who lives abroad and has a two-year-old, was upset that we weren’t having Christmas. We hated disappointing them, so they got on a plane and came here for a Christmas celebration the second week of December. Yup, the whole she-bang: a tree, stockings, presents, a Christmas roast, and a wreath. And you know what? It was lovely, introducing the two-year-old to Santa and stockings, and seeing her face on “Christmas morning.”

Now our oldest daughter might come for an early Christmas, too. It’s a good thing we got the tree and I put those lights up after all. (All these years, I’m the one who wanted lights. I can admit that now.)

I’m adjusting to my new reality. The children will gather with us, and with each other, too—my oldest son and daughter just had an early Christmas dinner together in New York with their spouses—but on their timetable.

And, on Christmas Eve, my husband and I will travel alone to New York, and maybe I’ll talk him into walking around Rockefeller Center and Central Park. Or we’ll see the light show at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It won’t be the postcard-perfect holiday of an entire family gathered under the tree, but I’m discovering that the trick to feeling joyful lies in celebrating the moments we have, not the moments expected.