Family Christmas in Sonoma

Just over two weeks until Christmas.  

For us as kids, Christmas was ritually a very stable holiday.  My mother made sure that certain rituals were repeated each year, rituals that she had more or less devised herself, but which to us kids seemed to represent  the true way that all non-pathological Americans celebrated Christmas. 

We were a small family in terms of non-resident relatives -- parents, aunts and uncles, cousins -- and so the rituals of Christmas almost always were observed in our small house: my parents, my brother and sister, my mother's twin sister and her husband, and my grandmother on my father's side.

The period of time during which these stable rituals occurred was little more than a decade, but a decade to a child (or even a teenager) is a lifetime.

Life is more chaotic as an adult.  Relatives insist on living all across the country, sometimes around the world.  And even relatives who are geographically near often prefer to act out their own family rituals, rather than merge into a gathering of the clan.

But this year, we will have such a gathering -- either at Christmas itself or, for some of us, during the week following.

Readers will recall that we had a similar family reunion in April, when my nephew Denny returned from Thailand to his California hometown, Sonoma, for the first time since the start of the Covid pandemic.  I concluded my essay describing our get-together with a plea for more frequent family reunions -- and my plea seems to have been answered.

We gather again in Sonoma.  Denny will return once more from Chiang Mai, Thailand, together with his wife Jessie, his now-teenaged daughter, and his dad.  My sister and her youngest son will arrive from Challis, Idaho.  My brother and his wife, together with their daughter, her spouse, and their eleven-year-old daughter will arrive from Southern California.  

We will also be joined by Suzanne, the daughter of my closest friend from college days, together with her husband -- visiting from San Diego.  She has stronger ties to my family than merely those resulting from my college friendship with her father, but those ties require more explanation than required at this time!  But they are family, too.   

And it will be a multi-family reunion, to some extent, as Jessie's family lives in the Sonoma area, and some of our gatherings will be together with them.

My  own somewhat solitary life in Washington state, in the Northwest Corner of the nation, at times feels like that of a tender of a lighthouse on a rocky outcropping from the shore.  Even though Washington is the ancestral home of my family, where my siblings and I spent our pre-college years, all but I have since fled our wintry rains like rats leaving a sinking ship.  So I look forward eagerly to these large gatherings, masses of people all related to me in one way or another, and wish they occurred more often.  It makes Christmas feel more like Christmas, even when celebrated in a distant land (i.e., California!).

I leave home on December 21, and will return on the 28th  My brother and his wife won't show up until the day after Christmas, which I regret.  But I spent a wonderful five days with them over Thanksgiving at their home in Palm Desert.

Now, my only problem will be explaining my absence to my two cats, trying to convince them that while the master's away, the cats can play.

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Photo:  Earlier family reunion.  Big Bear (California) (2011)