I’ve conclusively made the decision, just exactly today — Dec. 29, 2024, while cooking turkey-barley soup and pondering present reality in the poultry-fogged atmosphere of the stove — to officially stop attempting to live in the past, and stop clinging stupidly to old ways, but to forge forward, force a way forward, into a different future for myself and my family by sheer brute strength of my own obstinacy and foot-stamping will.
We are going to modernize the family culture and mind-set.
“New Year, New You,” as we used to say at Vogue magazine (and then roll our eyes, because it was a cliché, but a handy one).
I am going to begin this campaign of life-modernization and, as the Buddhists (I’m told) say, nonclinging by throwing our old holiday expectations and Christmas rituals out the back kitchen door, and onto the green-plastic trash can of personal history, once and for all.
The root problem, psychologically speaking, has been that I was raised in a family of ancestor worshipers more dedicated to praying and bowing at the incense-scented genealogical shrine than any Mandarin in a silk chaofu ever was. As I’ve mentioned before, I come from a long line of obsessive preservationists, and the family attitude has, finally and at long last, become untenable. It simply cannot be maintained any longer. Our preservationist imperative has extended not just to strong opinions about Colonial-era saltbox houses or salt marshes in need of government protection but to an unnaturally passionate dislike of any change of any sort to any kind of so-called “old way” whatsoever, from the pronunciation of the word “Pantigo” to the proper way to bake a molasses cookie or greet some dude with a French bulldog who happens to pass you talking on his cellphone about Pilates on the sidewalk in front of Clinton Hall.
No one in this house likes change, and I am the Empress of Retrograde. I am the Queen Curmudgeon. I am the Sheriff of Intolerance Town. And so I head into each day perpetually on the lookout for — not backsliding, but forward-sliding, you might say. Infractions against the preservation of anything old. Changes for the worse, which are everywhere, buzzing the house like the drones over New Jersey.
I don’t think this attitude is wrong, per se, today: The psychological hangup isn’t change so much as change for the worse. Prince Charles would agree. I don’t think it was ever wrong to begin with. But it’s certainly become no fun. It’s like standing in the road facing an oncoming parade of slow oxen and wet-nosed, red-haired Highland cattle, which turns into an oncoming rush of bicyclists ringing their bells for you to step out of way, then becomes an onrush of automobiles and angry honking, then turns into a five-lane expressway of driverless Tesla Cybertrucks doing 85.
Metaphorically speaking.
Get out of the road.
The most immediate and practical modernization to be undertaken, to address this futile clinging to old ways, is to me to stop trying and trying (and trying and trying) to maintain the Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities of my childhood in a world that — unless you are outside in the yard and looking straight up to see the summer sky or the night stars, and only the summer sky and night stars — is unrecognizable from that of 50 years ago. The neighborhood has changed (it’s more crowded with large and ugly houses but emptied of friends and indeed of people in general), and Main Street has changed, and the woods (as I keep repeating, like a lunatic) have disappeared, and no one sits in the living room reading E.B. White aloud anymore. Hardly anyone even plays backgammon anymore, do they? I miss MacNeil and Lehrer.
I realized this evening, in the turkey-barley steam and bedroom slippers, that it would be much more fun, not just for the kids, to do something completely different next Christmas. Fudge it. Fudge it all. Like, let’s save our pennies and stay in a hotel someplace we’ve never been. Copenhagen? Cairo? Nettie says her dream is to see Egypt.
It’s too quiet around here for an old-fashioned jolly, drunken Christmas. This is because, to put it plainly, our extended circle of friends who were considered as good as family, or better, have mostly died off — I won’t say “passed away,” as another of the obstinate family traditions was that that sort of prim euphemism was in bad taste — and this everyone’s-gone-oh-gone-oh situation makes the holiday parties of old difficult to replicate, for starters. Also, no one here has the cash to lay on a lavish feast involving 10 dozen Shinnecock oysters, a heritage goose, a whole-salmon slab of gravlax, a Hatfield ham, half a wheel of Stilton, and a case of Chateau Climens Sauternes from Jacques Franey. Or to pay helpers to assist with polishing the brass candlesticks and family silver, and I find myself surprised to discover I don’t have the time or inclination to polish the brass and silver alone. How did my parents do it all? I’m really not sure, not sure at all, but they did have help.
I will add here that I do miss Christmases when we girls wore black velvet bows and red-taffeta Wallace tartan. I miss the rustle of taffeta. I do miss Christmases when we made bell-shaped ornaments out of pressed Domino sugar and Dixie Cups. Someone’s mom smoking, baking, and listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir endlessly singing “Joy to the World.” God’s-eyes of colorful yarn and crossed sticks. WLNG’s call-in contests where you might win a keepsake crystal circus elephant from Whitman Gallery or a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. I miss the carol singing around the tree on the green at Sagaponack when Bud Topping climbed atop a tractor and lighted the tutti-frutti lights. I miss cocktail parties at someone’s parents’ house where they served cheese balls rolled in toasted almond slivers, which you secretly loved even though you knew it was wrong. Those mysteriously appealing “towers of treats” someone mailed your dad from Harry and David, with tissue-wrapped pears and red-waxed sausage, and singing “Heat Miser” at top volume in wet woolen mittens in the blistering cold as the sun sank fast beyond Mill Hill. But all that isn’t coming back, so, belatedly, belatedly, it’s time to embrace something new.
Edinburgh might be fun for Christmas? We could see “The Pantomime Adventures of Peter Pan” at the Festival Theatre on Nicolson Street? I do love a pantomime.