En Familia
In Spain, it’s Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, that is the traditional time for celebrating the holiday, and it is done en familia, with families gathering to share a sumptuous meal. Later, if they have no plans to attend in person, many will turn on the TV to watch the midnight mass, called La misa del gallo, in honor of the rooster that legend says crowed at midnight to announce Christ’s birth. So important is it to be with family that young couples sometimes separate for the evening, to be with their respective families. In one family I know, the girl’s parents invited the boy’s parents to join them for the evening, just so the young couple wouldn’t have to celebrate separately.
In big families, such as the family of my friend in Deva, the whole collection of siblings and their families gather for a large, boisterous meal. Kisses are managed on arrival, arms full of platters and packages. It’s a given that her two sisters in Asturias, with their families, and her brother with his family, will all come to her home to share the evening. While he was alive, the patriarch joined them. “That’s a lot of people sitting down at the table!” “Tables,” my friend corrected.
The celebration on Christmas Day also centers around a meal, but it is less formal and less substantial. Everyone, after all, is still full from the night before. But they are not yet too full of each other for more eating and laughing, talking and drinking. With a few benign elders and a couple of babies in the mix, family gatherings must be a heady, enticing blend.
Does it all go to people’s heads? Everyone is so certain of the right recipe for joyous conviviality that trouble is common. It might start with relatives vying for the best story, the best joke, the best comeback, voices louder and louder to be heard above the din—like bantam cocks strutting for attention. It might end in ruptures. Families with estranged members, children who do not speak to parents, or parents who do not allow children home; uncles and nephews, or aunts and nieces with tense relationships; siblings who fall out. This happens to the best of people—and happens all the time. Take my neighbor, who endured for years a difficult relationship with his brother-in-law. His relationship with his sister did not so much suffer as disappear as a result. Bad enough. But it gets worse.
When the brother-in-law died, my neighbor might have expected to resume his affectionate interaction with his sister. But his nephew, who had long lurked in the background, assumed the role of head of the small family of two. He took up the mantle of his father—the overbearing, strident style that had long been the rule in that household. I have overheard his tirades against his mother from across the lane when they come to tend the animals. My neighbor, who shares ownership of the old house and family farmstead, has witnessed even more than I have of the same domineering behavior he had long seen in his brother-in-law. His sister seems just as unable or unwilling to protect herself from this new abuse as she was from the old.
Then the nephew, with his newfound status, moved his new girlfriend and her daughter into the family home. To complicate matters, the girlfriend was his ex-wife, meaning the relationship had already failed once. A further complication was the woman’s daughter, who was born in Germany and spoke no Spanish. “Think about what you’re doing,” my neighbor had warned his nephew. That hadn’t gone over well, and as a result, the two men were soon barely speaking.
But before things were too far gone, the nephew made an overture to my neighbor by inviting him and his wife to lunch one Sunday in November. My neighbor wasn’t keen on going, but he did—to bury the hatchet. He was pleasantly surprised. His sister was doing well enough with her son, his girlfriend, and the eight-year-old daughter—tall for her age, thin as a rail, and polite and observant, according to my neighbor. Yes, he repeated, he had been very pleasantly surprised. It was a complicated setup, but the mother and daughter perhaps diffused some of the tension, and any relief for his sister was welcome to him. He shook his head. All those years under the thumb of her husband, and then, as soon as he was gone, subjugated to abuse from her son. The ex-wife knew what she was getting into, but the daughter was an innocent creature brought into a complicated situation. And yet, they presented a happy family picture that day, my neighbor said.
The coming holiday season would be the real test for that new family, as well as for the fragile détente between the two households. I wondered how the new family would fare, but I was more concerned with my neighbor and whether the peace would hold. Or even get the chance to be tested.
My neighbor’s wife is devoted to her mother, and every free moment finds her at her mother’s side—or worrying that she should be. I can’t imagine her giving up Christmas Eve for her husband’s difficult family. My neighbor, for his part, often urges his wife to lighten her load of worries, to “disconnect” and “take a break.” He almost certainly would have resisted spending Christmas Eve with his mother-in-law, an unhappy and demanding woman, for whom nothing more could be done.
Were it only the two of them, my neighbor and his wife might have chosen, as some young couples do, to separate so that both could attend to their respective familial obligations. But they have the perfect excuse not to: their own adored son, living in the Netherlands, where he is working on a doctorate in astrophysics. I know him. He is a model of discretion and pleasant manners. When he comes home, his parents welcome him with joy. For these three, to be en familia is a quiet bit of fortune in a season when many are negotiating the usual messy fallout of big family gatherings. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—the son can talk all he likes, with any competition coming only from a real rooster.
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