Holidays and nostalgia go hand in hand. Is there a custom or tradition of days gone by that you’d like to see make a return? How about the Edwardian craze of dressing up as a Christmas tree?
Share the old practice you’d like to see trending. Or a memory of a holiday from your past.
I really miss the Christmas days from when I was a kid.
Not the Christmas morning presents with my parents. That was usually a lot of passive aggressive tension because my dad would buy shit the day before for my mom (like even as a kid I knew she hated dry clean only clothes or sweaters with sequins or beads on them or that weren’t even her size) and then be just as surprised as me by what I got for Christmas since mom did all that work.
But then? After Christmas morning we’d drive over to my favorite aunt and uncle’s house for Christmas day and we’d just hang out and graze on stuff all day. Other family would stop by for an hour or two, maybe grab a ham sandwich and some pie or cookies, then shuffle on to the next stop. I’d get to hang out with my cousins and it was great.
What I miss isn’t something we did, it’s something we didn’t do. My mom was the oldest of her siblings, so she hosted the Christmas gathering every year. So once the presents were opened, I could just sit and play with them all day (with friends as available) until it was lunchtime.
Once I got married, that all changed. For years it was a power struggle between our two sets of parents and rushing around to get to their houses and stress and aggravation and lots of driving. Telling my daughter ‘Okay, put the toys down, we have to go now. You can play with them later.’ Going to my in-laws was awful because my MIL despises Christmas. She just wanted us there to make us as miserable as possible. Once my FIL died it got REALLY bad. Literally just sitting in her 95 degree house with Fox News on until we could make an escape.
My little sister hosts us all now, and this year she announced ‘forget it, it’s too much trouble and stress, we’ll just have a family party on a date TBA’ and I was thrilled. You mean I can just sit at home on Christmas Day and not drive all over hell and back? She did issue an invitation but I was going to decline. But now my wife says we need to go to iron out the remaining details on our trip to Ireland. I’m crushed.
My MIL still tries to ruin everything. She insists that nobody should come over and then bitches incessantly about how she was ‘all alone on Christmas.’ But she’s going to bitch either way, so I think we’re going to ignore her this year. We’ll see. My wife is extraordinarily susceptible to guilt..
So excited for you that you can just relax and enjoy the day without driving everywhere!
My Nonna lived with us so Christmas was always at our house. That meant opening gifts and immediately putting them away because guests would be arriving. I did enjoy seeing all my cousins though. As an adult I had to travel back to Pittsburgh for the holidays. Until Covid gave me a great excuse to stop. I miss spending the day with my family but not the anxiety about possible bad weather, packing all the gifts and cookies I needed to take.
Ugh. I hope you don’t cave to your MIL She sounds so awful. I feel for your wife who has put up with her for her whole life.
The dispiriting thing I remember when the kids were tiny was getting up at 5 am and traveling to get to my MIL’s house, and after getting the meet and greet she’d say how glad she was to see them and ask if there was anything she could do to help.
We’d say sure, can you give them a PBJ sandwich and we’d hand over some books to read so we could close our eyes for a little bit.
Five minutes later the kids would be unattended, bored, unfed and making a racket, and she’d be poking through old cookbooks in a back room, trying to find some odd 1960s packages food recipe she thought the kids might like.
“Hey, you know, they really like PBJ and they’d love to sit and listen to stories!” “Oh, OK.”
Five minutes later, same deal, they’re bored, unfed and unattended. “You know, I have an old grill somewhere and I thought I might get it out and make tuna cheese melts if I can only find the recipe….”
So we’d give up, feed the kids, read them stories, while she ignored them and puttered around trying to fulfill some image of a Good Thing she had in her head.
It’s so hard when grandparents (who mostly mean well) fail to hear what you and your kids need from them. I’m preparing myself for two weeks of that as my parents-in-law arrive on Wednesday.
I am your MIL I’m afraid. At least in spirit.
@matthewcrawley She is English. So that tracks.
As much as I used to bitch about having to stay up late on Xmas eve to roll out the insanity of my wife’s presents for the girls, I miss it. Even more so, I miss the look in their eyes when they walked up the stairs and saw all the presents under the tree. They just sent me some pics and videos of them landing in Venice & it is making me sad. I’m super happy for them and that they are finally at a point where they enjoy being together but I haven’t been without them for Xmas in 22 years!
This 19th century game sounds fun:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-snapdragon
Fun for the kids! 😂
For me it will probably be the empty house. One sister is traveling and the other will visit later this week.
I have a good friend visiting next week, but that’s it for Xmas.
The three spirits that haunt my Christmases are Hardrock and Coco and Joe. Maybe it’s a Chicago thing, but holy crap it’s creepy as hell.
😬
First time seeing this! That Santa is very scary.
Here’s a little Christmas miracle.
That seals the deal. I’m going to convert to Catholicism and take Better Half and the Faithful Hound with me. That’ll make three of us. Pope Benedict XVI had no problem with the Tridentine (Latin) Mass, but Pope Francis, the “liberal,” reforming Pope, wants nothing to do with them. Also, “Ratzi der Nazi” (that’s a very blasphemous nickname given to Benny XVI because he was a member of the Hitler Youth, but really, no one in Germany could have escaped membership at the time) was always up for a good exorcism, and that’s another thing that the upstart Argentinian objects to.
If I were Catholic, I would want it all. I’d want the clergy to wear different garments depending on the ecclesiastical season. I wouldn’t want to attend one of those cheap suburban postwar churches. No no. Victorian. And Latin. Latin all the way. The swinging incense. The choir boys (although I would keep my hands off of them.) I’d go to Confession every day. Why not? Sung Masses that go on for hours. I might join a choir, who knows? And then I would go to my eternal rest. Although it’s specified in my will that I should be cremated, which I think is kind of a no-no in the Catholic Church, but I don’t know why.
Happy Monday, everyone.
They do still change their garments throughout the year depending on the part of the holy calendar.
Unless they’re trying to look humble. But that really misses the point of the Catholic church.
I think you’re missing the point on the Latin masses. When Vatican II happened in the early 1960s, it led to a lot of changes to modernize the church. Like the priest facing the people and speaking in a language they could actually understand. Women not having to wear veils. Etc etc. When some congregations refused to follow the dictates, the big thing they wanted was the Latin mass supposedly. Well, rejection of Vatican II principles also meant rejection of a formal position of antisemitism and religious freedom (in the sense that if it wasn’t okay to be douches to non Catholics per Catholic doctrine anymore). It also proposed a much stronger emphasis on civil rights and responsibilities to help the poor etc.
So the Pope said fuck around, find out and excommunicated the parishes that refused to adhere to Vatican II dictates.
I understand on the surface it sounds really cool and traditional and omg so sad no Latin masses. But it was a massive dog whistle for the super conservative nutjobs wanting to not change their ways. Nazi Youth Pope Benedict bringing them back to the fold was a massive red flag to anybody who wasn’t super conservative in the Catholic church.
Right. It’s critical to stress that the slick writers and speakers who whitewash the Latin Mass movement are conmen out to take advantage of people who don’t know the history.
Another piece of it is that the whole Latin mass movement is inextricably connected to protecting child abusers. The reactionaries have always seen the abusers as useful tools for control, if they weren’t abusers themselves, and they are pushing the return to the Latin mass in part as a sign to abusers that they have allies in the return to the system of non-justice.
We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole talks about how the reactionaries and the abusers were allies in the old Irish Catholic theocracy, which literally ran not just the church but the state. And the church’s control of the government meant that abusers were not only immune to discipline from the church, but legal consequences as well.
O’Toole’s book lays out how horrifying the child abuse was — he covered it in depth as a reporter and he describes both the statistics and the stories. And of course it wasn’t just sexual abuse — there was unspeakable physical abuse committed on children but also others who ran afoul of the monsters in the church and ended up institutions like the Magdalene laundries which enslaved women.
It’s absolutely horrifying stuff, and the Latin mass types are deeply corrupting people out to take advantage of people who don’t know any better.