Family rituals

This time of the yer it seems there just are not enough hour in the day or enough days in the month to do all that we want to do, or all that we "should" do.
The tribes will be gathering soon and, like the wind in our part of the country, some will blow in unannounced. We will welcome the newest babe, the matriarchs and patriarchs, and those in between, with the familiar rituals that our family has called "our way." And if we don't, the cry will go up,"But we've always done it that way!"
Rituals do lend to the uniqueness of a family and they help define their connectedness. Holidays provide opportunities for members of the family to participate in those rituals in ways that reaffirm their commitments.
Mothers often measure the passage of time with holiday memory markers. 1955? "Oh that was the year our oldest learned to walk. We had to put the tree in the playpen to keep him away from it."
"Remember how hard the winter of 1979 was? That was the year the kids told us we were going to be grandparents. The snowman they built during their Thanksgiving visit was still standing in the yard when the baby was born in the spring."
"Our next door neighbors, now close friends, moved here the year the kids painted the sugar cookies with undiluted food coloring. The carolers who stopped at our house for cocoa and cookies trooped next door to sing with multi-colored teeth."
Baby's first Christmas. The cradle-shaped ornament dated 1961, triggers memories of a little blond boy, all dressed up in a french-blue Eton suit, peacefully sleeping through midnight Mass.
The loss of a family member sometimes necessitates restructuring of familiar rituals. While our son was bedridden, the last year of his young life, he painted some stained glass Christmas ornaments. He thought he was my favorite child (they all thought that)and when he died I thought so too. A numbness surrounded our hearts and Christmas came that year with uncontrolled tears like the carelessly hung tinsel on the unwanted tree. Christmas afternoon we removed the wreath from the front door and our family drove to the barren cemetery to put it on the grave.
We have kept that ritual. The wreath, a symbol of the circle of life, has provided our family with a way to define a connectedness that cannot be broken by death.
Over the last two decades I have tucked one of those stained glass ornaments in the Christmas boxes so that all the siblings and their children, and soon the great-grandchildren will have one.
Sure holidays are a lot of work, but the memory markers, and the memory makers are what defines the particulars of the group of people called family.

Maturity

This year the season of maturity, or depending on how you look at it, the incipient decline into winter, arrived before the equinox party even got started. An early, record breaking, freeze set the leaves in their place on the apple tree. Because my days begin without my bifocals, the tree, which is full of gray, curled leaves, looks like the back of the perm-haired senior citizens who sit in front of me in church.
On these fall mornings, darker each day now; I pad into the kitchen in my furry for-fall-slippers. I pull up the window blind and with dismay not the minute changes that confirm what I already know. Winter is riding on heavy clouds and muscling her way across the autumn skies. In the yard, that for a short time was brilliant with autumn colors, the trees are bare. Their limbs that stretch skyward in a kind of supplication tremble from the threatening bitter winds.
The children's swing flips wildly in the wind and yet the apples that are black and mushy from the freeze cling to their rightful places. There was a time when the now ghastly appearing tree offered juicy red apples and there was another time, long ago, when voices from the swing cried, "higher, Daddy, higher."
Our weathered birdhouses, once hubs of activity, are now barren, abandoned - true empty nests. My husband ritualistically carries a large pot of bright red geraniums out to the porch each morning and back into the kitchen each evening trying to save the plant, a perhaps himself as well, from the inevitable winter kill.
Webster, that word master guy, defines nostalgia as "a wistful, sentimental yearning for the return of a past period, or an irrecoverable condition." This morning, as I waited for the wafts of fresh brewed coffee, I sighed with despair at my sepia-colored world until I watched a squirrel scurrying here and there searching for something to save for an uncertain future.
Perhaps the irrecoverable condition that fuels my nostalgia is my youth, and yet in the depths of my melancholy there is hope. It is said that hope springs eternal, and while I do not hope to ever be young again, I do tuck hope in with each tulip and each daffodil bulb that I put to rest in seemingly lifeless soil. I will leave the swing in its waiting place and save the birds houses from the ravages of winter so those "empty nests" will be there when spring arrives.
If maturity is defined as "the termination of a period that an obligation has to run," then rumors of my maturity are greatly exaggerated. I have obligations! There are fruitcakes to bake,gifts to wrap, cards to write and seasons of uncertainty to prepare for.