Holiday Positives

At our speaker’s club Thursday, the Topic Master spoke of the stress-free holiday he had enjoyed – clue: without family.  He recalled for us those strains and tensions of family holidays – the expectations, the shoulds and shouldn’ts, the pressures and judgments -- and how free of all that he felt this year.  There were empathetic nods around the table, so he challenged each of us to share a positive holiday memory, and the tales brought smiles all around.

My father was a challenging figure – a workaholic under the pressures of WWII and the Cold War that he had to deal with at the War Department and the AEC.  He also was a bit of a martinet, demanding at table that we three kids defend our views, use precise words, think clearly and logically.  It was how one raised a child, as he had been raised.

 

Later on, he learned to relax, long after I had left home. Until those later days, though, I lived in awe, admiration and respect, yearning for his approval and affection.

My younger sister is a poet.  Her poetry selections this year (her 23^rd annual gift of her works that meet her standards) included one entitled My Father.  The long and poignant portrait of our Dad and her relationship with him included this stanza:

               My father was my model for approach/avoidance.

               He terrified me.  I dreaded/couldn’t wait,

               Until I heard him enter the house,

               Tall and smiling, or grim and cold,

               He was our own weather system.

               His mien cast the atmosphere.

               . . . .

She, the youngest, grew a close and loving relationship; he mellowed and she managed him better than did her older brother and sister.  We, on the other hand, had issues to resolve.  

But not at Christmas.  At every Christmas time, a boy emerged.  Dad loved the holidays -- the music, the lights, the fellowship.  He blocked out those “real world” tensions for a time and lavished his joy on all.  Christmas Eve and Morning were ceremonies of suspense, New Year’s day an open house for friends, neighbors and acquaintances – an open house with roaring fire, punch, often roast oysters and always pans of fin and haddie.

The first year after leaving the AEC and moving to private industry, in New York City, Mom and Dad rented a house in New Canaan.  It had a 16 foot living room ceiling – the boy’s Christmas dream.  He bought a 15’ tree.  Our stored decorations were at best for a 7’ tree; off to Gus’s Hardware for strings and strings of lights, cartons and cartons of bulbs and garlands – and, oh yes, a 12’ step ladder in order to place the stuff and put the sacred star atop the whole.  Christmas décor that year was a budget-buster for Mom.  (A once in a lifetime: the house they built and moved into the next year, and all subsequent houses, had but 8’ ceilings.)

So the Soltice Holidays were always positive and welcome in our home, not just for themselves, but because they cracked open the patriarch and let out that gentle Ohio boy, whom my Mother so loved, hidden inside.