On Smaller Traditions

It is mid-December and we are only now preparing for the holidays which are now ten days away. I call my mother to ask her about the usual timeline of events: cooking our traditional food, visiting our grandma’s old house that my uncle stays in now, and seeing the extended family usually scattered off in their own ways. 

I ask her to call the aunts and the uncles and plan. But she doesn’t want to do it the old way anymore. 

“It’s time to start new traditions,” she says.

Now that our grandmother is gone she thinks there’s no point. I fight back to little success. It’s similar to what my uncle said to me, before we married a few months ago. 

“It’s time you focus on your own family now,” he said.  

It seems like a lonely pattern to take part in. Get married. Start a nucleus family. Stay in that lane. I see it is an invitation and a limitation. I want to make space for more. 

Society shifted us to be smaller, siloing from the city, from community, and in our case as our family moved farther from Detroit they moved farther and farther away from one another. Over the years we gathered just one time a year, Christmas, and now it looks like that’s it. 

Aren't we a part of a bigger, more global world now more than ever before? Or are we still in our own smaller tribes of our choosing? Here we are now in an in-between space, between solidarity and solitude that I don’t want yet. 

I just wanted to bake cookies and bring everyone back together the same exact ways we’ve done in all the years before. But grandma is gone, and mom isn’t feeling it. 

“Why is everyone so grumpy about the holidays?”  I ask my sister. 

“I can’t eat anything this year with my allergies,” she says. “Even gluten-free perogies I still can’t eat those.” 

“I’m sorry. Those perogies were pretty hard to make last time we tried.”

“I’m not doing that either. I might not even go to the other party,” she says. “Can’t eat anything there too.”

“It’s like we have to hurry and have kids to get people excited again,” I say, half-joking, and she laughs, but does not hesitate to tell me to get right on that.