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How Christmas Traditions Saved My Family But Ruined My Relationship
By Tracy Stefanucci
My ex hated tradition. He was raised by ex-Catholic artists who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, and they taught him that anything traditional was to be reviled. Tradition represented stagnation, limitation, authoritarianism. The family preferred to travel during the holidays, to always do something new. Their favorite Christmas was the year they stumbled through the snowy streets of Paris and wandered into a random restaurant for Christmas dinner. I picture snow falling under the light of the street lamps, the Eiffel Tower in the background, my ex eight years old and making goofy jokes that send his parents into fits of laughter.
My family has more or less had the same traditions every year for Christmas. In the early days we would go out for Chinese food on Christmas Eve, but later, when my Nonna feared that she wouldn’t be alive much longer, we started to have a yearly seafood feast at her and my Nonno’s house in East Vancouver. Around fifteen people crammed into the small kitchen, pots steaming and pans hissing, as we talked and laughed loudly. Plates were piled high with pasta with tuna sauce, bacala, prawns, salmon, and salad. Christmas day featured a traditional turkey dinner with homemade apple, blueberry and pumpkin pies at my parents’ house, with an assorted cast of guests. On Boxing Day, extended family and friends would descend upon my parents’ house for an array of snacks, an open bar, pool and — once the guests were past buzzed — karaoke. I looked forward to these traditions every year. Settling into the rhythm of them, enjoying them, reflecting on them, made me feel like there was something reliable in the world.
I tried to explain this sense of security to my ex. I would say things like, “Traditions connect you to who you are, who you’ve been, where you come from. They are rituals that are beyond time, reaching to past, present and future.” He thought this was preposterous. His programmed response: “Why would you want them to dictate what you do?” Radical acts were necessary to him. Conforming to expectations always made him uncomfortable.
When my Nonna passed away, the same fifteen or so family members who attended the Christmas Eve dinners gathered around her in the small hospital room. We bore witness, together, and comforted Nonno as he cried out to his wife, asking her not to leave him. Nobody knew what to do or say. There is nothing predictable about grief, no script to follow.
It was late and no one had eaten dinner yet, so we all went to Gold Penny Restaurant on Hastings Street. It was my first time eating there, but my dad and his brothers had frequented the place when they were younger. We ordered steaming dishes of wonton soup, sweet and sour pork, fried rice, beef and broccoli. Like the early Christmas Eve dinners, we passed around the greasy platters, scooping mounds onto our plates. We ate, we talked loudly, and we laughed.
My Nonno learned to cook — really well — in my Nonna’s absence, but eventually preparing Christmas Eve dinner came to be too much work for him. I began hosting it in my 500-square-foot apartment, with a pass-through kitchen and a dining room the size of a walk-in closet. I prepared the tuna sauce and the bacala, my dad made the prawns, my uncle the salmon. We piled paper plates with food and sat on the couch, the floor, dining chairs, a stool, folding chairs brought by guests. Despite not seeing each other very often and having little in common on the surface, we were able to be together, to give and receive love. It really wasn’t any different. The warmth, the laughter, the connection carried over. It didn’t really matter where we were, maybe not even exactly what we did. What mattered was that we were together, that we did anything at all.
The hospital room was also full when my Nonno passed away. We stayed with him for a while afterward. I remember burying my face into my partner’s shoulder, crying and slobbering all over his jacket, blowing my nose again and again and again. This time, even if we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, we at least knew where to go. We all met at Gold Penny Restaurant. We feasted, clinked bottles of Yanjing beer, laughed.
Tradition lets us relax into and be held by the familiar, to focus on connection and let go of anxiety or expectations or doubt — because even when we’re not sure how to feel, we at least know exactly what we should be doing. It acknowledges what has come before and sets a path for what is yet to come. It evolves. We make it our own. There are additions and subtractions. Like everything else, it is in flux — it changes, we change. People, places, relationships come and go.
Last year, as had become customary over the past five years, my partner’s parents joined us for Christmas Eve dinner in our small apartment. While his mother seemed to enjoy the big noisy family — it reminded her of growing up with twelve siblings — his father became quiet and withdrawn. The situation reflected everything he had stood against his whole adult life — people who preferred to cook on a barbeque, who would swear without hesitation, who define art as pretty pictures or objects used to decorate a home, who say things like “you don’t live to work, you work to live.” In a small act of protest, he put “Kandinsky” into the charades bowl as a prompt. It got tossed out, because no one knew what it meant.
My partner’s parents were the first to leave, and after hugging us goodbye they pulled him into the hallway. I let the door close behind them, took a deep breath and headed back to join my family.
When everyone left, another Christmas Eve had come and gone, and I was flooded with love. I felt so blessed to have this eccentric cast of characters as my family and to get to talk and eat and laugh with them. To me, this buzz is the “magic” of Christmas.
But something had changed in my partner’s face. Suddenly, he was yelling at me. His parents didn’t get to see us enough. My family hogged all our time at Christmas. It wasn’t fair. Though he didn’t hit me, it felt like being struck unexpectedly. I felt small, like a wounded animal. Rather than yelling, I cried and pleaded. I didn’t want to engage in an argument. I wanted to run. I tried to leave, to drive the forty minutes to my parents’ house, but he followed me to my car. He said that if I left him — by himself, on Christmas Eve — it was over. He would break up with me.
I couldn’t do it. I could cry until there was only empty space in my chest, but I could not be alone. Being with my partner felt like gravity — not so much a choice as a law of physics. While my partner feared the inertia of tradition — the stagnation — it was the soothing nature of familiarity, of repetition, of reliability, that bound us together. So I went back, and I slept on the hide-a-bed, my stomach full with grief and sour from all the seafood and red wine.
I awoke with a dead stillness in my heart. I floated through Christmas morning on autopilot and showed up late to Christmas dinner at my brother’s — a brand new tradition, now that he had his first child. My partner went to his aunt’s house, his family’s one Christmas tradition. I was distracted and depressed. I felt like I was outside of my body, watching myself go through the motions. It was difficult to relax. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing.
I tried to remember all of this in early December, as I faced my first Christmas alone in five years. I broke up with my partner at the end of September, and have lived on my own since May. This year all of my traditions are shifting; all of the comforts and expectations will need to be recast. While venting about this to my ex, still a close friend, I say, “Well, it can’t be worse than last year.” I’m only half joking. He laughs, but I know the laugh has pain behind it too. Sometimes the only thing that helps is remembering how miserable we were when we were together.
This year, I went through our old ornaments, made by friends at parties we had in the early years of our relationship. I hung my favorites on my aloe vera plant with a string of lights, bought a candle that smells like cedar, streamed holiday music on CBC while I wrapped presents. When my dad called to ask, “Are you hosting Christmas Eve dinner?” my response was, “Of course.”
This year my sister was out of town for Christmas, visiting her partner’s family in rural Ontario — the first time in our lives we have been apart for the holidays. My brother’s partner could not come to the dinner, but his son, the first grandchild in the family, was there for the first time, shouting “One, two, three, go!” as he raced his trucks along the coffee table. My uncle and his fiancée attended for the first time and brought homemade carrot cake and an arrangement of fresh and chocolate-dipped fruit, but his three daughters were in Hawaii for Christmas. My other uncle and aunt came with their two sons, bearing an assortment of thoughtful gifts as always. My dad brought all the odds and ends I don’t have — buns, extra paper plates — and my mom brought homemade cream puffs. My ex and his family, of course, were somewhere else.
I prepared the tuna sauce and the bacala, my dad made the prawns, my uncle the salmon. I pulled out the stool, the dining chairs, the chair from the bedroom. People sat on them, and on the couch and the floor. We ate, talked loudly, and laughed. We played “the present game,” in which my uncle was overjoyed to win a toy sheep that poops brown jellybeans, then a charades game in which my cousin freaked us all out with his rendition of “French kissing” (it involved pointing at my uncle’s fiancée, who is from Quebec).
After all of the guests went home, I stood in the light of my Christmas aloe and gave thanks to my Nonna for starting this tradition when she was afraid she was going to die. I remembered the way my cousins and I popped garlic-soaked prawns into our mouths and dredged our Portuguese buns in the infused oil in the bottom of the dish. I remembered the time I brought a boyfriend and some visiting Italian relative got him to eat a delicacy cheese that had wriggling maggots in it. I remembered hosting the dinner in the first apartment my ex and I lived in together, and how that event was the first time I saw my ex’s uncle — who passed away the following year — come out of his shell. I remembered my mom and my aunt, with red wine–stained lips, making dirty jokes, then laughing and laughing. My cousin holding the pug that now lives with my ex. The vegan strawberry chocolate bliss balls my sister made for dessert the year after she discovered her food allergies. The half-bottle of moonshine my uncle won in the present game one year.
I feel here. Present in the right now. But I am also there — and I also feel secure in a future that may or may not include hosting Christmas Eve dinner. Despite the ever-present nature of uncertainty, the instability and spontaneity of grief, I have let my heart open, let the patterns and routines carry me: the soaking and boiling of the salt cod to make bacala, the handing out pens and scraps of paper to play the games, the laughing, the hugging, the red wine. My first Christmas “alone” has been spent surrounded by people who love me, who are here, who know exactly what they are supposed to be doing, because we do it every year.
