Sandy Springs: Kids home for Christmas is the best gift
The tree is not up, no one has hung stockings by the chimney, but I already have my gift. The kids will be home for Christmas. Amelia has already arrived from South Carolina. Zach will join us next week from Indiana. Both are in school and doing quite well. And if you ascertain a wee hint of bombast in the above, you’d be right.
Having all of us under one roof is a dear commodity these days — and will only get more precious as their lives unfold. Having them back with us, in their own beds, beats the living daylights out of all the diamonds and luxury cars TV commercials tell me are the gifts of a lifetime. Bah! Humbug!
When we’re all together there is extra meaning to our holiday traditions. The four of us will go to church Christmas Eve for the late afternoon service, which doubles as the children’s Christmas pageant. One year Amelia was Mary. Another year Zach would have been Joseph, but he spiked a fever.
The tree will be up before Zach gets home, but a small box of ornaments will be set aside because, well, they are his ornaments. Years ago we’d go shopping Dec. 26 and each of us would choose an ornament for the following year. When he was much younger Zach chose a dog with a leg that had broken off. He explained if he didn’t choose it no one else would, and ever since our tree promulgates a three-legged dog.
Every year Carol and Amelia make a gingerbread house from scratch, and every year we hold on to it just a few days longer, well past the time when decorations have been packed away. This year’s may make it to Super Bowl Sunday.
Speaking of Amelia and Carol, the three of us will head out soon to select the tree. I have what appears to be the easiest job — I hold up the prospective conifer while the ladies walk around it. They assure me that my contribution is vital to finding just the right tree.
Christmas morning Carol always makes cinnamon rolls — the kind that come in a can you open by smacking it against the corner of the counter. It is an insurrectionary departure from her considerable culinary skills, but traditions endure.
We do these things out of habit federated with affection. Though Zach and Amelia are grown, we still refer to them as “the kids.” It is as much wishful thinking as what we’ve always called them. There is felicity in saying, “The kids will be home for Christmas.”
In the years to come, when our kids have their kids, our traditions will disappear and theirs will begin. Enigmatic things, these traditions. They are the nexus that binds our family, but some must eventually give way with the passing of time.
And that makes this so much more exquisite; the kids will be home for Christmas.
Jim Osterman lives in Sandy Springs. Reach him at jimosterman@rocketmail.com
