Marrying Into the Family Christmas

Every new couple must decide how to celebrate rituals: my family's way, yours or a joyful new creation?

The ideal 1950s family Christmas is about to begin in this painting by Norman Rockwell.

I had never seen or heard of Christmas crackers until they showed up at my almost in-laws’ table nearly 40 years ago.

Where I came from, crackers were Triscuits topped with various cunning garnishes and passed around to guests by my sister and me. Dry sherry flowed from an ocean-blue decanter that made a cheap brand look expensive. The Christmas crackers at the Jones table looked like favors from a six-year-old’s birthday party—cardboard cylinders, the size of a toilet-paper roll, from which you pulled a tissue-paper crown. Then, with cracker in hand and crown atop your head, you crossed arms, linked crackers with the revelers on either side and gave a good hard yank. Out spilled the bounty: a fortune for each of us, and the kind of plastic toy that used to come in cereal boxes.

At 20, I thought I was above such stuff. How could I have fallen for a guy who wore a tissue-paper paper crown at Christmas?

In that first tentative phase of couplehood, every day seemed a contest between my way with domestic matters and the perplexing deviations of the man who shared my fridge, my bathroom and my only closet (the bed was the one easy part). On top of all the everyday conundrums, we now had to negotiate Christmas. I had always assumed there was one right way to orchestrate seasonal cheer—the Maynard family’s. I didn’t understand that in order to live like a grownup, I would have to break free of the cherished yet constricting Maynard family Christmas.

Our cookie jar brimmed with homemade treats that my mother never gave away lest she deprive her own family of a single buttery mouthful.

We Maynards did not so much celebrate Christmas as stage it. We always had the Carmen Miranda of trees, every fragrant branch encrusted with glitter. It brushed the ceiling, so heavy with ornaments it once toppled under its own weight. After that my father tied it to nails hammered into the wall. The tree stood guard over a cascade of presents (you’d think there were at least five kids in this household instead of just two). Our turkey was never frozen, our mince pie never bought at A&P. Our cookie jar brimmed with homemade treats that my mother never gave away lest she deprive her own family of a single buttery mouthful. At the time this never struck me as odd.

We owned one Christmas record, carols sung a capella by a full-throated ensemble whom I used to picture tripping through a snowfall in top hats and bonnets. To me the Randolph Singers were the only conceivable soundtrack for Christmas morning, and the only member of the family who could start it was my father, the wizard of our personal Oz. On Christmas morning my sister and I would hover at the top of the stairs, listening for the opening strains of “We weesh you a merry Chreestmas” (that’s how the Randolphs pronounced it). Every detail of the day underscored the panache, the exuberance and the frantic traditionalism of the Maynards as compared to lesser families. No one ever joined us for Christmas dinner (another oddness I didn’t question). My father had broken with his family; my mother’s lived far away and were Jewish. Imagine a Broadway show mounted for the cast alone. That was the Maynard family Christmas.

The Maynards’ last Christmas together in 1972. My father, holding my toddler son, is drunk. My sister Joyce is on the left; I’m pretending I don’t need glasses.

hEven after I left home for college, I looked forward with a primal longing to the frenzied merriment of Christmas at Maynard Hall, as it was known among ourselves without irony. My husband, whom I met at 20 and married at 21, couldn’t share my delight in Maynard rituals. Just by arriving on the scene, he stripped away my seasonal illusions. The first year he came for Christmas was the year my parents fought at the dinner table—unheard-of in our house. No sooner had my mother carved the turkey than she fled the room in tears while my father eyed his plate with sullen defiance. He was drunk—again. His alcoholism—silently tolerated, never discussed—was tightening its grip on us all.

I should have realized things would never be the same. Yet I was stunned when my parents split up, leaving my sister and me to divide the Christmas ornaments (I let her take the Randolph Singers). Our mother returned to her Jewish roots; our father went his way. So much for the Maynard family Christmas. It had all the staying power of a naked fir, left by the side of the road on its own fallen needles. Like it or not, I would be celebrating Christmas with the Joneses.

Last weekend three generations of the clan filled my sister-in-law’s house—all 25 of us in one place for a Christmas pot luck. Some of us travel the world, one of us is living overseas, quite a few have other seasonal festivities and potentially treacherous roads to navigate, yet there we all were with our plates balanced on our laps, just glad to be together. The soundtrack consisted of ripping paper, clinking glasses and the cries of small cousins tearing about. We had no Christmas crackers, no Brussels sprouts, no potatoes roasted in dripping or plum pudding with custard sauce. In my mother-in-law’s day, such omissions were undreamed-of. We do Christmas differently now, with my sisters-in-law at the helm, and one day the next generation will add take over. This is how Christmas should be, an ever-changing joint creation. Households flow into one another like rivers to the ocean, all of us bobbing in the spray.

Heading home with my husband in the starry dark, I realized that I’ve now spent more Christmases with the Jones family than I ever did with the Maynards. Thank goodness. The real measure of any family’s Christmas is the welcome it extends, and this family—now mine—has gracefully made room for spouses past and present, as well as children who are starting to have children themselves. Next Christmas we’ll have two new babies, one my second grandson. It’s going to be another great day.

I wrote this a quite a few years ago. Our second grandson, at 14, is much too jaded to tear around chasing his cousins. Do you have treasured family rituals for this time of year? Or did you, once upon a time? How did they come to be?