What Has Become of My Christmas Traditions?

Well, it is Christmas morning and all is quiet on the home front now. I am imagining the excitement of those homes where small children live and remembering how it was when our own children and later grand children were small. As I do I am taken back to the days of my own childhood and the excitement that Christmas brought. Ah, those were the days. I wouldn’t trade them, as my English mother would say, “for all the tea in China.”

I suppose every family has its own Christmas traditions and well they should. Christmas is significant because it is a metaphor for what God has done in providing the only road for man’s  redemption. Let’s just stipulate that “Jesus is the reason for the season.”  After all, at it’s core  Christmas marks the birth of Jesus. The birth of the Christ child should be at the heart of all our Christmas traditions however varied they may be.

It is Christmas traditions about which I wish to write. Not Christmas traditions in general but my family’s traditions and what they really meant and said about us.

First, because my family members, no matter what else they may have been, were deeply committed to the Christian faith and were in the deepest meaning of the phrase, “spiritually minded” our traditions grew out of Scripture.  Our family was also structured more like a clan or tribe than a single family. As I have written previously, my aunts and uncles were more like secondary parents and my cousins like brothers and sisters. There is a sense in which that is still true of those of us who are grandchildren of Claud and Sarah Appleby.

Don’t misunderstand my point here.  My father and his siblings all had their own families but there was, and in my heart and mind still exists, a sense that the extended family was at least as significant and important as the “immediate” family.  In a large measure we developed our sense of being, significance and worth from the larger extended family and that was reinforced in our own family units.

Above everything else we were a Christian family and our name was Appleby. That meant that by simply bearing the name “Appleby” we were expected to conduct ourselves in a certain manner. To bring dishonor to the Appleby name was seen as a betrayal not only of our family name and values but of the Lord Jesus himself. It also meant that no member of the family, regardless of how far from those values they roamed, was abandoned or cast aside. Another attribute was that spouses once in the family were always in the family. As one former spouse said, “It was easier to get into the Appleby family than it is to get out . . . getting out is near impossible!”

My Clan (I shall refer to my extended family as the Clan) was structured around the sixth  commandment . . . “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”  We were not really a paternalistic or maternalistic clan in the strictest sense. As long as both of my grandparents were living they were honored by their children and grandchildren as the head of our clan. This was a position of honor and not authority. They earned the position as head of our clan by virtue of the strength of their character.

To be sure the individual family units could do as they wished and often did. Each one developed Christmas traditions of their own. However, the individual family units always gathered on Christmas Eve as the Appleby Clan to celebrate the birth of Jesus and our ties and unity as an Appleby. It was such a heart warming sight as brothers and sisters and cousins all with their families in tow began to gather on Christmas Eve for the annual clan gathering. That gathering was always in the house where my grandparents were at the time.

I suspect you are beginning to see where this narrative is going. Our Christmas traditions grew out of the Christmas story itself and our clan like family structure. All of our Christmas traditions reinforced our existence as a family. Nothing was more important than our faith in God and our commitment to family.

As time passed and my grandparents passed with it so did the strength of the annual gathering. Like most families there simply was enough strength of personality or character among the children of my grandparents to assume the mantle of head of the clan with the same degree of honor and character that would draw the rest to a central gathering.

To be sure we tried to keep the annual clan gathering in hopes that one day it would regain its former glory. However, that was not to be. I mourned its lost. I longed for its return. You see I didn’t understand then what I know now. The clan I knew as a kid was in one sense gone but in another it had simply metamorphosed. The sub clans (individual family units) became clans in their own right . . . thus the cycle continued or as I like to think renewed itself every third generation.

A few years ago we had a cousins reunion in San Antonio, Texas. These cousins were three generations removed from Claud and Sarah Appleby . . . old enough to remember the old ways and young enough to realize that each one was a chieftain in their own right. It was like and annual gathering of the “Fathers” and our oldest cousin was the honorary head of all the clans.

In that gathering a strange thing occurred. We reaffirmed our heritage and acknowledged the old ones as the source of our core values. I think each one gathered realized, maybe for the first time, in a comprehensive way that at that gathering the past and the future had met in the present. I know I came away with a new assurance that while the old traditions for me were a memory they were alive and well in my children and the children of my kinsmen. It still means something significant to be an Appleby.

It was during these gatherings that we realized we were more than our own personal family unit. We were a large group of people who shared a common faith and held common core beliefs that distinguished us from everyone else in the world.

It was then and there that it occurred to me that what was significant to me about Christmas for the Appleby Clan beyond the obvious birth of our Lord was my family . . . is what it means to be an Appleby. Our tradition of an annual Christmas gathering where the whole family is gathered and served as a the main event that connected me to all the Appleby’s who had come before me and those who come after me probably will change or even vanish. However, what was signified in that gathering will go on. Things like family and personal integrity, respect and honor for the older generation (especially parents), honesty, loyalty and the Christian faith continue.

My ancestors were not shadowy figures but real people who handed down from generation to generation what it means to be an Appleby. We, the Appleby clan, are a continuum. I am who I am because of who my forefathers were. 

We could live our lives freely but we must never compromise the integrity of our family name. You
see it is not my name alone. I share it with my children and my cousins and their families. My actions reflect on them and theirs on mine. I am duty bound to maintain the integrity with which that name has historically been regarded.

Thanks to the pages of Facebook I have been able to follow the lives of many of my cousins children. For the most part this has been reassuring. Our family values will continue even if the specific traditions do not.

However, having said all of that, I still think there is something to be said for the annual family gathering and how it binds us together as the extended Appleby Clan. I understand and I accept the changes in structure but I do not appreciate them or feel they are as valuable or as good as those with which I grew up. But at least the core values continue. I cannot help but feel that something important has been lost in the family diaspora.

Best of all, in the end, there will be a Glad Reunion Day.