ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 22, 1996 TAG: 9612230017
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: NEW RIVER JOURNAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
My uncle's note arrived before Thanksgiving to alert us: the 166th Christmas celebration at our family homeplace near Fincastle would be held Saturday, Dec. 28. It was time to mark our calendars, recheck our Christmas lists and figure if we had any momentous news to announce to the family.
We'll gather in the parlor where Aunt Lucy's Christmas tree would stand each year in a magic aura of silver tinsel and sparkling lights. I can still see the presents carefully piled in separate corners of the room waiting for each of us cousins when we raced down the stairs Christmas mornings as early as the parlor fire could be lighted.
The family lineup has changed in these past years. Aunts have died after long and feisty lives; cousins have grown up and married; new nieces and nephews have brought to our reunions the sort of hilarity and energy only little children can.
Yet the core of the family stays the same.
The ties that hold us together have amazing resiliency. One quiet cousin, who had disappeared from family gatherings after dropping out of college years ago, has returned.
To his amazement and our unspoken pleasure, he has delighted in being back. He has found that family similarities have somehow strengthened rather than weakened over the years. He's found cousins who share the same passion for books; he's come home to a warmth that asks no questions, demands no excuses.
Family, after all, is what this holiday is all about, not some frenzied competition of toys and festivities to be measured on a Martha Stewart nostalgia index.
If we do feel nostalgia for Christmases past, perhaps it is because we seemed to have had more time for family then. Guilt that we neglect our children, our parents for more urgent, less important matters is part of our lifestyle these days.
The holiday season gives each of us a time to reflect on families - on traditions and memories that bind us together.
Another distant cousin who had lost touch with our family came back into our orbit this year when a letter arrived unexpectedly - 30 years after his last visit.
I remember him from my childhood days as a handsome, hopelessly sophisticated teen-ager. He didn't remember me at all. Summers, he and his grandfather would motor up from the big city of Charlotte to spend weeks with my grandfather on the family farm. Hot summer days saw him driving the hay wagon, trying to prove himself to my grandfather, a man legendary for his capacity to work even in a day when hard work was the rule.
A life that seemed destined for success has held more than its share of personal tragedy and illness in those 30 years. But his letters tell of the pull family memories still exert after all these years.
"Being an only child, I missed out on the camaraderie of a big family," he wrote after being part of a large birthday party for my grandfather. "You could see and feel the love among each member of the family, young and old alike," he wrote.
Many of those who peopled his memories are gone, but the family lives on, its traditions linking us through generations as we gather once more at Christmas - our 166th in this home full of memories.
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