Preparing: Family Traditions

This post was originally supposed to be happy, joyous, and full of fa-la-la-la-las. But I just can't right now. I want to write about family traditions and what my family does at Christmas, but my heart is filled with an ache for a family of my own and a yearning to start my own family traditions. I get the singleness blahs around the holidays, some years are worse than others. I see couples spending time together, parents deciding on what to buy for their children, and families figuring out the when to go to all the families' Christmas gatherings. I know in some respects singleness is a blessing. I have less people to buy for if I choose and I only have one family I to spend the holidays with. My life is simpler in a lot of ways. I recognize this. But that ache in my heart is still there, refusing to go away, longing to be filled.

The picture above is of some of the stockings hanging in my grandpa's basement. Every year, my mom's side of the family gets together at my grandpa's house to open presents one at a time, eat, talk, eat, and talk some more. My aunt started making these stockings years ago, and everyone has one. They are all unique, and each person recognizes their own (mine is the second from the left, top row). I have had the same stocking my whole life. We now have about 20 stockings. When I think of Christmas with my family, I think of these stockings. We are all very different people in my family, but we do make time to celebrate Christmas together. We are like the stockings. Different but together.

In my apartment, I don't have a stocking. I would like to, but it seems weird to me to have one stocking hanging from the mantle. I don't want to have two because the second would not be for anyone--empty and without meaning. Someday I hope to have a mantle, and maybe even a wall filled with stockings, but for now, it is not this day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memorial of Genocide

Background: In 1975 Pol Pot and the communist party Khmer Rouge came to power. The face they put on for the world was one of an ideal communist society, but the truth behind the mask was one of terror, mistrust, and murder. For four years, Cambodia endured and struggled for survival. Help came in the form of an invasion by the Vietnamese army, and the world was made aware of the millions of deaths that had been ignored, denied, or unheard. It is estimated that approximately 2 million people died directly from the genocide and another million died from the forced famine. The world had seen genocide before but not one committed against a group's own people group. This is thirty years later.... On Tuesday, my second day here, we visited Tuol Sleng or S-21. This was a high school that the Khmer Rouge used as a torture center where people accused of committing crimes against the party would be taken before they were executed. Only 7 out of 17,000-20,000 people survived. The compound is ...
Read more

Week One

We have been in the country a little over a week, returned to normal sleep patterns after jet lag, and already experienced some different ministries. It was a very hard first week. I experienced some culture stress as Cambodia is nothing like I imagined or expected. I will record more of my cultural observations and struggles on this blog in the next few days as I journal about them. I also had a hard week physically. Not with stomach problems as many might suppose, although my stomach is adjusting as well, but with a really bad heat rash that was all over my back, arms, and thighs. It has taken a few days but is now starting to clear up. Two main things I learned from this week are 1.) God is the only Sustainer and 2.) this trip is not going to be anything like my trip to Japan. Week 2 has begun and everything looks brighter. Monday we started teaching summer school at Logos International School. I thought I was going to be teaching art for two weeks, but after a visit to the school l...
Read more

Language of Remembering

Image
In my post "Ebensee" I mentioned that I have been reading for my PhD while travelling to different places in Austria. As I was on the train to Ebensee, I was reading Dirk Lange's Trauma Recalled: Liturgy, Disruption, and Theology . The focus of this book is how. How do you put a traumatic event into words? How do you describe it? How do you recall it? How do you remember it and bring it about in repetition? He writes, "What does it mean to witness or remember an event when the truth of the event cannot be represented?" (69). This reading set me up for what I was about to experience in at the former concentration camp location in Ebensee. Not much remains of the camp. There is the main entrance, the now cemetery which was and is the location of mass graves, and the tunnels in the mountains about a 5 minute walk away. The town has built up and on the camp. As I was walking around I thought back on Lange. How does one remember, continue to remember, when living amo...
Read more