When I was in my early 20s, I considered the annual voyage “back home” for the holidays a necessity. I lived in New York City immediately after college and missed my family desperately. Even the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center and the snowball fights in Central Park couldn’t satisfy me as much as that $500 plane ticket home.
When I moved to San Francisco at age 26, my feelings went unchanged — initially. The idea of a Christmas without snow just seemed sad—pathetic, really.
I looked forward to my family’s midwestern Christmases, which often reach Rockwellian proportions — I’m talking actual sleigh rides, 16-feet-tall Christmas trees, snowmen too big to get your arms around, heaps of presents, rounds of hot chocolate and carols by the fireplace.
On Christmas Eve, my burly, construction-worker cousin reads a Dr. Seuss book out loud for the kids. We play Royal Rummy and eat pickled herring and cheese whiz. Sometimes it’s the only time all year when I see my brother and cousins. I don’t just love my low-drama family; I like them too. They are the people whom I would choose to spend the holidays with every year if life didn’t make it complicated sometimes.
No cleaning. No cooking. No small talk with people I see only once a year. Plus, I don’t have to bite my tongue when my Republican great-uncle claims our president would be just fine “if he would stay off the tweeter.”
And yet as I got later in my 20s, it got more complicated to make the trip every few years, whether it be because I couldn’t afford the airfare, get time off from work or bring myself to face the holiday travel madness. In those instances, I missed my family, sure, but I also felt a surprising sense of relief.
There were no obligations. No cleaning. No cooking. No small talk with people I see only once a year. Plus, I don’t have to bite my tongue when my Republican great-uncle claims our president would be just fine “if he would stay off the tweeter.”
And frankly, spending that much time in below-zero weather no longer seems hilarious or exotic — we’re either stuck inside with my mom’s cats and piles of antiques, or we spend an hour bundling up for 15 minutes of sledding before I start to seriously worry about my extremities.
Navigating these two feelings of sadness from being away and relief from being away, I have gradually found a balance and learned how to enjoy celebrating Christmas in California.
The one year I wasn’t able to go back home from New York City, my then-boyfriend and, now, husband introduced me to what he called “Jewish Christmas,” which involves spending Christmas day at the movies and eating Chinese food. This cultural tradition was common in New York City, of course, but it turns out to be also absurdly popular in San Francisco, a city full of transplants and kid-free couples.
The first time we tried it in SF, when I was 27, we showed up at the Westfield Mall for a movie, only to learn that everything had sold out. Every showing. Of every film.
So we decided to move on to Chinese food, but we couldn’t find a single spot in which to park in Chinatown because of the annual Jewish comedy show — Kung Pao Kosher Comedy — which happens at one of the larger Chinese eateries, New Asia Restaurant. Leave it to San Francisco to take something that was a wink-wink tradition and turn it into an event you have to wait in line for. We wound up near Polk Street at some mediocre place with an admittedly delicious pu-pu platter.
Disappointed, I immediately vowed to spend the next Christmas with my family.
And I did. But a few years later, as I was nearing 30, I couldn’t get enough days off from work to make the trip home, so I tried harder to enjoy my holiday experience in San Francisco.
I went to Macy’s to see the kittens and puppies up for adoption in the windows, which led me to the four-story-tall Neiman Marcus tree. And then to the six-feet-tall sugar castle in the Westin St. Francis.
I even baked an enormous pork pie and spent days maturing a British Christmas pudding — things my family never bothered with but seemed like just the right thing for our first Christmas alone as a married couple and to distract me from missing my family.
I took pictures of my husband in front of the giant menorah in Union Square and drank overpriced hot chocolate from the stand nearby. We saw an amazing production of A Christmas Carol at the American Conservatory Theater. We rented a car and drove to the Delancey Street Trees lot to buy a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree, which took up half of our tiny SF living room.
I even baked an enormous pork pie and spent days maturing a British Christmas pudding — things my family never bothered with but that seemed like just the right thing for our first Christmas alone as a married couple and to distract me from missing my family.
Shortly after that, I discovered the mother lode of all things California Christmas: the Dickens Fair, every Christmas nerd’s dream. Each year the Cow Palace is transformed into Victorian London, complete with Santa, Scrooge, hot buttered rum, roasted chestnuts and carolers in period dress. It’s hot and expensive and crowded and spectacular.
We got into a nice rhythm of one year on, one year off, which my mom grudgingly accepted and seemed to make everyone happy.
Then I had a kid.
Suddenly, it seemed imperative again that we haul ourselves across the country to see the family every year. He needed to know about sledding and giant Christmas trees, and Grandma needed to feed him too much sugar. So for the first two years, we did just that.
The first year, the entire family got the stomach flu, one by one. The second year, it was below zero for an entire week — even for Northern Wisconsin, that’s pretty extreme. So we decided that this year we would give ourselves (and our bank account) a break.
This is the first holiday season my son won’t be at Grandma’s house. He is two and a half now, and this is the first year he is old enough to understand the concept of Santa (sort of) and presents (“I need more!” he declared after the first night of Chanukah). Deciding how to operate during the holidays takes on a new level of urgency when you have a kid. I don’t feel the need to shower him with presents, but I do feel the need to create memories.
And so we’ll be visiting all our spots in Union Square and then some. Hunting through my local mom Facebook group has led me to add to our list the Fairmont’s giant gingerbread house and Tom and Jerry’s wildly decorated house near the Castro. How is it possible I’d never seen these before? It is also the first year when I’ll be braving the Dickens Fair with a child. I expect meltdowns. And memories, of course. But more meltdowns (his and mine).
This year, we will lean in to our lack of obligations.
We will FaceTime with Grandma and finally bother to put up our own tree. And we have an invitation for a Christmas Eve celebration with our close friends, who also decided to decline a cross-country trip with kids to visit family. When they told me that they were going to order Chinese food, I was disappointed at first — still feeling that on Christmas Eve, you’re supposed to eat a giant roast and biscuits and apple pie and other totally ridiculous food, and that you’re supposed to drink spiked eggnog, not decent wine from Sonoma.
Then I realized that they, too, while being sad not to visit family, are also relieved. If none of us has to cook, then why should we? None of this is our usual tradition, and there are no rules. Why try to re-create my mom’s venison roast when it will never be as good (and where would I even get venison)? Why should my friend spend hours making apple pies from scratch when they’re going to do it next year with grandma?
Instead, this year, we will lean in to our lack of obligations. We will eat dumplings and drink wine and let our kids watch movies until their eyes start to grow heavy. Then we will call a Lyft home or maybe even walk and look at the tiny smattering of Christmas lights we might find on each block along the not-snow-covered way.
We will be back in the Midwest again next year, but now, instead of feeling sad that my son has missed out on a family Christmas, I’m happy that he has two traditions to celebrate. I suspect that each one will seem all the more special for being distinctly different from the other, that he will grow up with an appreciation for whichever one happens to be on deck for this year, whether we stay home or go back home.
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Eileen Rinaldi, CEO and founder of Ritual Coffee. More coming soon, so stay tuned.
