For better or for worse, ’tis the season for making memories.
Plenty of parents, it seems, feel the pressure every year to provide their offspring with memory fodder akin to something worthy of a Dickens novel.
When I told my parents I’d been assigned to write about my favorite holiday memory, they nearly fell over themselves recounting some of our family’s less graceful holiday moments. My dad was incredulous. “What do you mean you’re having trouble coming up with something?” he said. “The material is endless.”
There was the time my grandfather almost burned the house down by feeding crumpled paper to the fireplace until flames reached the garland resting on top, setting the entire mantle ablaze, or the time when I was around 6 and my dad’s friend sneaked up to our back door dressed as Santa to surprise the kids and, as my dad eloquently put it, I “almost had an aneurysm” from fright.
They may have been joking, but my parents had a point. Fights, broken decorations, absentee relatives, rude gift reactions: there’s a beauty in all of it.
I have one particularly fond memory of my grandmother charging at the tree, armed with a spray bottle and shouting at her two cats, who both had somehow managed to shimmy up the trunk and bat at the star precariously perched on top, breaking several ornaments along the way.
To answer the prompt, it would be easy to give a cop-out answer of making cookies, opening a much-anticipated gift (Red Ryder BB gun anyone?), or something along that vein. Memories like these are undeniably nice, but the ones that really make the holidays stand out are the unplanned mishaps that remind us a little dysfunction goes a long way.
The holiday season can be exhausting. Whether we’re missing a loved one, stressed out from school or work, or feeling the financial strain that comes hand in hand with “the happiest season of all,” plenty of us are wilting just a little bit by this time of year.
Maybe we can take some comfort in the acknowledgment that it’s OK to embrace the holiday season in all its messy splendour. After all, a little mess can even make for some unexpectedly warm memories.
