Home For the Holidays

We’ve had our family back for the holidays – our daughter Amelia and son Jeremy, their spouses Pete and Mary, and our granddaughters , 4-year-old Ellie and 3-month-old Abby – and it’s been one grand time, at least for us grandparents, if not always for the whole brood (we don’t do things always the way that our children do). In various combinations, we’ve played games, watched movies, taken walks to the park, and of course spent all of Christmas day exchanging gifts, eating brunch, driving to an expanded family gathering, eating a large dinner, and exchanging more gifts. Excess as the season requires. It’s satisfying to see that our children and their spouses are all readers and are instilling that virtue in our grandchildren (though I’m not quite sure what to make of their fascination, if not obsession, with playing games on their smartphones; perhaps it’s just a way of passing the too many down times that seem to happen when we’re around). My main – almost sole – contribution to the gathering is the cooking. The night after Christmas was easy in that I could fix a (leftover) turkey tetrazzini, one of our children’s favorite dishes when they lived with us. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a particular hit with Ellie, nor was the accompanying green salad, though she did try to pick at what I told her she might like (not to much effect). She did though enjoy her first viewing of The Wizard of Oz (one of the scores of gifts she received), demonstrating at one point a precocious pre-school interpretative ability by announcing toward the end of the Oz color sequence of the film that she thought it was all Dorothy’s dream. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to repeat this holiday gathering. The kids each live on opposite coasts, and certainly as their families and the cost of air travel grow, it will become more difficult for us all to come together. But for at least this year, we were.