This year, a nephew announced he wouldn’t be spending the holidays with his parents. Instead, he had booked a hiking and skiing holiday with his university friends.
When his grandmother relayed the news to me, I expressed interest in his travel plans. Where was he going? How long? What route would they be travelling? Where would they be hiking?
For some decades, I’ve lived many, many kilometres distant from my childhood family, and heading off for independent holidays has been among the choices I’ve exercised during Decembers. When I heard of my nephew’s plans, my reaction was: “How exciting. What fun!”
It was delicately hinted that my reaction was just a bit insensitive. My nephew’s mother, it was reported, was having some difficulty with the decision.
He’s the eldest child.
It’s his first year away from home.
Now, it’s his first Christmas away.
His parents hadn’t anticipated this to happen so soon after he had vacated his near-daily place at the family dinner table.
Mournful confidences had been shared, and a few tissues had been quietly dampened.
Like my nephew, my own broadening of December-holiday choices and independence occurred during university, when I lived much farther from my family than he does now.
The relative who lived nearest to me was an inconvenient four-hour journey away. But we were good friends, and it was with her that I cooked Thanksgiving and Easter dinners during those years. And it was with her that I travelled one blizzard-filled December to spend the holiday in New York City with her oldest sister’s family.
After listening to my nephew’s grandmother (my mother) recount the effects of his news, I reminded her of her own unwelcoming response to my long-ago announcement of my New York Christmas plans.
“You were not encouraging.”
“I was worried about you.”
“Worried? You were ticked off. And you let me know it. And you did the guilt thing … And the if-you-run-out-of-money-don’t-call-home thing. All of which just ticked me off. So, then, of course I HAD to go to New York.”
“Was I? Did I?” She paused and thought for a few moments. “Well, you were the first. You were the first to leave home and move far away. You were the first to not spend the holiday at home. It was a big change for me.”
Few socially accepted life-stage rituals remain in Western culture. Aside from starting first grade and giving birth and the start of parenthood, few events in any person’s life mark a definitive dividing line between before and after. Few celebrations offer the no-turning-back/forward-is-the-only-option finality of a true rite of passage anymore. Of course, some religions and cultures within our Western mosaic do retain some of these rituals — bar and bat mitzvahs in the Jewish faith, for instance.
During the latter decades of the last century, leaving home signified the end of childhood and the start of adulthood for many people. However, leaving home is no longer final. Many grown children are returning home, not just for the holidays, but for months and years on end.
Weddings once marked the end of childhood, or at least singlehood, and the creation of entirely new family units, obligations and loyalties. But in our culture, marriage is optional, and when it occurs, its finality is also optional.
Yet, amidst this desert of ritualism, a family-level micro-rite of passage exists. Despite lack of sacrament and ceremony, and despite lack of broader, social acknowledgment, a young person’s voluntary choice to break with family custom and spend significant holidays on his or her own terms denotes the end of one life stage and the start of another.
The decision may not be permanent. Just because a grown child doesn’t spend a particular holiday with the family — however that family is defined — one year doesn’t mean she or he won’t be back the next year or the next holiday.
However, the shift itself is permanent and marks a turning point.
For the young person, and for the family.
