Columnists
HoHoHo and Bah Humbug
’Tis the season, or so it would seem. Like it or not, we’re holly and dreidel deep in the Holiday season. Some folks hate to see it happen in November, but that’s the way it is and, from my reckoning, it’s the way it always has been. I actually don’t care when it starts, but it seems to me we barely got the tinsel out of the rotary brushes of the vacuum cleaner and Fa la la la la, it’s back. Maybe it’s an age thing. Time flies for me and drags for our granddaughter. LOML and I haven’t started the festive-ness, yet. The pumpkins have only just been tossed into the compost heap and the leaves still need to be cleaned up in the yard. Nope, he and I save most of jollies until Prince Edward County Parade Weekend when the big push is on. If you know me, and some of you swear you do, you know we start with the parades and the parade party. We actually call it “Tree Weekend” because it’s when we assemble the tree and get the brothers, their others and our kids and their kids together to decorate the joint.
Sneaky, you say. It could be. We prefer to call it our seasonal tradition of getting other people to do the heavy decoration lifting. A tradition that got started in the early nineties. Until that time, LOML and I would pack our kids, the presents, the cat and our best behaviour into the Rollscan- hardly, drive for three hours and spend Christmas in Toronto with his family and my family. Often holiday was five days of driving back and forth between the grandparents’ homes with a soupçon of his sister, his brother, my sisters, my brothers and all of their others. Too much food was consumed. Too many late nights were spent being a guest. Too many treats were offered, and just plain too much everything that wasn’t home. We did decorate our home and have a little party prior to heading to the Big Smoke, just to say we did Christmas at home. One day we truly woke up to what we were doing and decided to stop the Toronto- Festive-Insanity Tour. It wasn’t fun anymore, if indeed it ever had been. On the plus side, we continued the tradition of decorating a bit early and now include a crew of people who have decided the County is more fun than the City. Parade weekend was born. Don’t get me wrong, we did head to the city to visit, while our parents were still alive, but we’d only stay for a day or two. The thing is, we all need to create our own traditions, right? Of course we do. Our festive season traditions are an engaging schnozzle, a fusion if you will, of food and fun and music. We embrace all of the ethnicities our family has to offer. And no, we aren’t textbook perfect, nor are we a storybook family. We’re just us.
This year we have some extra family staying with us until they find a home of their own. We’ll adopt some of their Vancouver traditions and see how that blends into the melting pot we’ve got going on here. Parade weekend will still happen with oodles of extra people. LOML and I will rely on the kids, their kids, the brothers and the others to get the HoHoHo trolley on the tracks. So, Happy Holidays or Festivus or Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzza or whatever jingles your bells. It’s just around the corner, kiddies.
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