Making Room at My Table
Being the host for gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas has long been my role in our family, which boasts thirty members on each side. And whether hosting my in-laws at Thanksgiving, or my own kin at Christmas, it’s a position in which I take considerable pleasure: creating a space that radiates warmth for relatives old and young; serving a meal that promises enough left-overs for everyone to take home an arm-load. I love the slick humor that runs through conversations like jazz riffs, and the familial yarns told as if they’re being shared for the first, rather than the fiftieth time. What joy to brush off the welcome mat and open the door wide. Every year, I am ready. All in for a grand time.
As our family’s event planner, I also enjoy making key decisions. I am the one who determines the hour we all congregate, or when grace will be said, or who should sit where. But that’s where the truth about being the one running the holiday gets sticky: while I tell myself that I’m simply being a good hostess, there’s a bottom-line—I grew up in a home featuring a lot of people and very little room for privacy. Most of the time, unconsciously, I still expect there to be a hubbub with which I find it difficult to deal. It’s that exact sense of pandemonium I aim to head off. Consequently, I’m always looking for ways to feel in control. In control, but not a control freak.
Usually, I imagine myself a school crossing guard—the cheerful woman who shepherds the assembled from Point A to Point B, and at day’s end, back to Point A. My goal while on duty is clear and the ground rules are few: no verbal tussling; no butting in line; no lagging behind when it’s time to move on. Comply with my directives and nothing will go wrong. Simple, right?
It has always seemed so. Until this year. With the holiday season’s approach, the number of Coronavirus cases have spiraled out of control yet again. Now, the whole idea of setting and following the rules has taken on a different tone. “Noncompliance,” for example, resonates as something far more serious than it did when my worries centered around whether our boisterous clan might cause too much commotion. As reports of more and more COVID “hotspots” march across my computer screen, I become more and more unnerved. Now, the “rules” are not about which jolly participant should sit where, but whether anyone at all should be allowed to pull up a chair.
Over and over, we’ve been advised to abandon gatherings whose numbers stretch beyond the number of people living under one roof. For me, as Quality Control Manager for our holiday gatherings, this meant that the parties were over before they could even be planned because our retinue was too large to start with. And so, for Thanksgiving, there would be none of Grandma’s award-worthy giblet gravy. No swarm of little ones buzzing up and down the stairs. No cramming elbow-to-elbow around the fireplace after the dirty dishes had been cleared. Despite eventually acknowledging that I was going to have to give up this particular holiday altogether to avoid any possible quibbling about which way to proceed, it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going to very much miss playing Martha Stewart this year.
How impressed I was by friends who’d researched all the possibilities and found what they believed were fairly certain ways to maintain their traditions while at the same time remaining reasonably safe. They planned to keep their numbers small; insisted on everyone being COVID tested just prior to the holiday; and promised to quarantine before and after to limit both viral exposure and possible spread. Even though I understood that there was no way I could pull off such a feat considering the size of our family, I was nevertheless envious of those lucky enough to be able to celebrate together.
My jealousy was tempered, however, the week before Gobble Fest, after chatting long distance with a friend. She was among those who had taken as many precautions as she could while finalizing her plan to bring together eight members of her tribe. But then her idea took a complicated nose-dive. “What do you mean your stepdaughter is asking “why” she and her kids need to get swabbed before they come over?” I’d huffed. “Who doesn’t already know the answer to THAT?” Her story, as it developed, was similar to one I would hear the very next day from another woman. Quoting her cantankerous uncle who lived several small towns away, she mimicked his gravelly tone: “A damned mask? All I’m looking to do is sit in a corner of the room and mind my own business.” Listening, I stifled a laugh.
In recent days, I’ve thought more about how all of us, whether we like to admit it or not, are seeking solid pandemic “footing” in this holiday time. We long to feel a sense of normalcy and to regain control over our lives. We haven’t been told what to do and how to do it since we were kids. In response, many of us become “rule setters,” “rule followers,” or “rule defiers”—descriptors that emphasize order as a method by which to assuage our anxieties and fears. Little wonder then, that we may find it difficult to arrive at a consensus about how to celebrate the holidays as family, when each of us is struggling, albeit differently, with so much that we will never be able to control.
Nevertheless, the school crossing guard who lives in my mind wishes, yet again, that she could shepherd her charges to a place that guarantees safety, comfort—and, yes, merriment, too. A place of celebration where nothing can go wrong. Unfortunately, I do not have the power to guarantee such a thing. But compassion for our common struggle in these uncertain times? For that, there is ample room at my table.
Have a comment or feedback you want to share? Chat with Terry below!
Best,
