Bring families closer together
12/24/07 01:47 PM
My mother and father passed away these past years and every time a holiday comes around I am reminded of those days back home around the dinner table with family. My mother loved to cook and if she could cook for others she was in heaven. We would have appetizers, a salad, a main course which was usually turkey or roast beef. I was lucky because in those days very few women worked and my mother was a stay at home mom. My uncle and grandmother would usually come over and soon there would be house full of people watching TV, talking politics and opening presents. To me these are the best memories of Christmas not the gifts but the warmth of a family. I can now understand as the years passed why my dad would become down this time of year...without family Christmas was never the same.
I believe that we all work too much and spending one, two or three weekends with our family is not enough. I love to have my in-laws over to visit and open some nice bottles of wine to share over dinner. We sit around enjoy our food, drink too much wine and pontificate about life. In this way I am lucky as well and I often wish that there were a lot more days like this. Our jobs have taken us 2000 miles away from our in-laws and that's too bad because I enjoy sharing my wine with them. It seems like the holidays now are just the mad getaway as people flock to airports to make the pilgrimage to their relatives. When the come back it's always good to be home but those memories will be with them a lot more as they get older...trust me on that.
So I do miss those times with family but the memories are there to keep me happy. I am reminded that it's not so much what the holiday means as much as what it means to each of us. Time does go by quickly but hopefully people always find the time to say..I love you and Merry Christmas.
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