The Turbo Season

So many of us have this either wonderfully or excruciating complex relationship with December.

For most, be they Christian or not, Christmas is a dominant catalyst for what we do and how our relationships play out. It seems turbo-charges everything – from shopping to family dynamics to social interactions with friends and colleagues. Whatever usually happens during the rest of year seems, for better or for worse, to be magnified three-fold in December (just like the Grinch’s heart!) This applies equally to joy, loneliness, anxiety, happiness and generosity of spirit.

One aspect of this dynamic is how we see our families. Many of us look at other families assuming that they are “perfect” and wondering how we can ever compare with whatever our own blend of weird uncles, intra-sibling conflicts, control fixations, and off-beat traditions. I was reminded of this when our family attended Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café Christmas show last weekend.

(For those who don’t know about The Vinyl Café, it is a CBC radio show that is a bit like Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, with a blend of music and stories, either sent in from listeners or written by the show’s creator and host Stuart McLean and his team. Many of these are about the fictional family headed by Dave and Morley and relate to interactions with families, neighbours and life. Dave seems like a hybrid of the cartoon character Herman and a Bill Cosby creation, all neatly wrapped in a stereotypical, earnest Canadian package. The Christmas stories about Dave and Morley are often the best. You either love The Vinyl Café or hate it, and I am devotedly in the former camp. McLean takes his show on tour across the country on a regular basis, and Alison and I have been going to the Christmas show for about a decade. For the last few years, we have included our kids, my mother and aunt, as well as a variety of friends and relatives. It is one of those experiences that cuts across generations and I always leave with a smile on my face and my heart feeling just a little bit warmer. I highly recommend it.)

This year’s Vinyl Café Christmas show featured, in addition to the usual amazing and often little-known Canadian musical talent, two new terrific Dave and Morley stories. One of these dealt with Dave and Morley’s first meeting with their daughter’s boyfriend’s family, and over Christmas dinner no less. McLean does an inspired job humorously capturing the angst created by the collision of a teenager’s two previously separate worlds.

The older I get, the more that I realize that there is an absence of “perfect” families (the Cosby Show was just that – a show, not reality,) and that all of our families are quirky in their own special ways. The major differences are in terms of degree and specifics. The quirkiness of great aunt Edna in your family is matched by, but completely different than, old weird cousin Harold in mine. And while your brother may be completely fixated on how to cook the ham, my sister has meticulously strong views where every light bulb should go on the Christmas tree – exactly. (And none of these may come close to our own personal peccadillos.) In many cases, there comes a time when we have learn to do more than accept – we have to embrace our quirkiness and realize that it can be fun and interesting … and even enjoyable. Imperfection at Christmas dinner will make it more memorable, more exciting and more entertaining, if we choose it to be.